


Adventures in Ebimanyou Town

by TheVulpineHero1



Category: One Hundred Percent Orange Juice, QP Shooting - Dangerous!! (Video Game)
Genre: Comedy, Cross-Post, F/F, Kemonomimi, Loose Continuity, Mild shipping, No Plot, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-03-20 18:19:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 34,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18997990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVulpineHero1/pseuds/TheVulpineHero1
Summary: In a world where flying dogs barf bullets like no big thing and every other girl has animal ears, every day is an opportunity for adventure, laughter, and most of all, trouble. Assorted light-hearted stories from the QP Shooting universe. (Cross-posted from my blogspot.)





	1. Favourite Customer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As with my Suguri/Sora collection, Tales of a Warless World, this is an assortment of QP Shooting stories without any particular continuity, varying quality, and mysterious age. I've excised the original author's notes because they're not relevant anymore, but I'll start including them once we catch up with present day.

_Cover Art by Coffgirl (<https://twitter.com/CoffgirlDAZE>)._

* * *

 

Aru's ears drooped. Despite being a functional killing machine equipped with the powers of flight, seasonal gifts, and spewing bullets out of her face, she was still beholden to her lapine nature. Some part of her would always dislike loud noises, unnatural tastes and arguments, and the look on Arthur's face told her that an argument was well on the way.

"Hey, Mr Shopkeeper. Give me a cola, with plenty of ice," Syura commanded. Syura was petite, redheaded, and completely unaware of her own particular place on the food chain. There was a certain smugness about her that screamed Stage 1 boss, in Aru's opinion.

"Do this look like a grocery store, kid?" Arthur growled, his eye twitching behind his dark glasses. The butt of his cigarette, held loosely at the corner of his mouth in defiance of all smoking laws, crumpled as his jaw begin to grind. "We don't stock cola."

"Who cares if you stock it? I asked for a cola. A real, hot-blooded merchant would see this as an opportunity," Syura replied, half wheedling, half scolding.

"Oh, believe me, my blood is boiling right about now. I'm a businessman, not an errand boy. How about you take a little walk around the block and get a cola yourself?"

"Hey, I'm doing you a favour,  _businessman_. You know how much time and money  _real_  businesses spend on analytics to figure out what their customers want? I just told you for free. It's my first time in this shop, my frenemy is showing me around, and I want a cola. Make it happen," the girl said, puffing out her somewhat unimpressive chest. "Of course, I'll pay you extra for your time. I'm not an unreasonable lady."

"That's just because you ain't a lady," Arthur sighed. He stubbed out his cigarette in a cheap ashtray on the shop counter, and blew a leisurely ring of smoke. "...How much extra we talking about?"

Syura smiled a catlike smile, and launched her negotiations in earnest. She was a veteran of videogame bartering systems and economics; she knew how much a broadsword was worth and how much an adventurer could expect to be paid for slaying their first novelty giant-sized rat. Arthur, on the other hand, knew how to use his stern looks and rough voice to gouge a price. It ought to be a close contest, Aru thought, but it was better than an actual fight. Assured that she would have no need to administer some concussive diplomacy, she turned her attention to QP.

QP was a regular customer at the Rbit Room. In fact, she was  _the_  regular customer. Not everybody had the temperament, discipline or desire to learn the ancient arts of the battle bunnies. In fact, the general, uneducated consensus was that these arts did not exist, which was a definite problem when it came to paying the bills. Yet QP would wander into the shop after school like clockwork, clutching her allowance in her hands, carefully inspecting musty tomes on rabbit warfare and then asking if the contents could, perhaps, be summed up in the form of a limerick or a haiku to help her understand them. Aru was not particularly good at either, which lead to memorable offerings like:

_Glimmer of power,_

_You are the pew-pew windmill_

_What up, it's Orbit_

Regardless, the dog girl always seemed to appreciate the effort, because, as she said, it came from the heart. She had a talent for seeing the best in everybody that Aru, as a result of her own duty to peer into the hearts of children across the globe and pronounce a select portion of them to be naughty in the sovereign eyes of Santa, had difficulty fathoming. QP did not, for instance, see Arthur as a grizzled, chain smoking, questionably ethical merchant motivated only by raw greed and the fear of Aru's retribution. In fact, her opinion of Arthur seemed to stop at "tall", which was a small mercy for all parties involved.

"What brings you here today, QP? We're always delighted to see you, but are you looking for anything in particular?" Aru asked, ignoring the intense economic debate going on between Syura and Arthur.

QP scratched her nose. "Well, uh... Actually, Syura was just being really weird, and I needed an adult. The closest thing to an adult I know is a big bullying cat who throws darts around everywhere and leads an evil organisation dedicated to taking over the world, so I decided you were my next best bet."

"You keep such interesting social circles," Aru murmured.

"I don't really  _keep_  them. I'd throw them back into the ocean if I could. I just keep running into strange people and they stick to me," the dog replied mournfully.

_Ah, so she's acquired a quirky stable of friends she doesn't really like that much,_ Aru thought.  _She's finally begun to mature as a shoot 'em up protagonist._ She left that unsaid, and tried a different tack. "I'm happy for you to hang around as long as you like, but I don't really understand... Syura is your friend, right?"

"Kind of."

"Kind of?"

"It's ambiguous," Syura said proudly, having paid Arthur four times the going rate for a cola and sent him on his way. She was flush from what she no doubt considered a victory. "Nice to meet you, by the way. I'm Syura, embryonic developer of videogames. One day, I will hatch into a beautiful game dev swan!"

Aru fought the urge to roll her eyes. "Very interesting social circles, indeed. What exactly was she doing that was so weird?"

QP opened her mouth to talk, but Syura beat her to it. "I wasn't doing anything weird. In fact, I was being generous, and telling my unemployed friend here how I'd give her a job when I get my studio all set up."

"She wants me to wear a maid outfit," QP added, mournfully.

Syura shrugged. "Well, of course. Your head is full of pudding, so I can't let you handle any of the code. All you'd need to do is flutter around the studio, bring me tea, address me as master, let me rest my head in your lap and massage my temples whenever I get tired of looking at the computer screen, and then occasionally do some light debugging. It's a cushy gig!"

"The rest I could deal with, but the debugging is too much! It's sexual harassment! Tell her, Aru!" the dog said, and clung to Aru's arm like it was a anchor against a flood of madness.

Aru, however, had transcended her mortal form and was roaming in the magical world of her own imagination. A girl with dog ears  _and_  a maid outfit? Surely it was too much power for one mortal to have. The amount of money and popularity that she could amass in the hidden circles of the world was astronomical. A very small part of Aru -- the part that mourned as it watched the Rbit room go into decline, the part that wanted to eat quality food instead of economy rice day after day after day -- whispered in the back of her head, telling her that she should harness that power.

Another part of Aru had gone in an entirely different direction. QP was her favourite customer, but she'd rarely ever seen her wearing anything but her school uniform. Putting aside the maid cosplay, which was too dangerous to think about in public, she wondered what her friend would look like in more classically feminine clothes.

"Aru? Earth to Aru? You zoned out for a little while there," QP called, waving her hand in front of the rabbit's eyes.

"While drooling," Syura added helpfully.

"Yes, well, um, shop harassment is against sexual rules. I mean, sexual harassment is against shop rules!" the rabbit replied, feeling a trickle of sweat wind its way down her forehead.

There was a moment of silence. Then there was another moment of silence, consecutive to the last. Moments of silence began to shunt into each other like minecarts on a crowded track. Overpopulation of moments of silence began to threaten the national ecosystem, and local government authorities sent out an all-points bulletin to park rangers announcing the sad necessity of a cull. Then, at last, Syura spoke.

"Fine. I'll allow it. You go on ahead, QP. I want to actually look around this goofy little shop and drink my cola."

QP, anxious to escape and run home for a cup of well-earned pudding, seized the chance and trotted out of the shop. Syura watched her go, a wide smile on her face. After the dog had been gone for a good few seconds, she turned to Aru, and grinned. Aru blanched.

"...Were you looking for any merchandise in particular?" she tried.

"No," Syura replied, shrugging. "I was just thinking that maybe we share some interests, you know? We could be great friends. Hey, hey. Take a look at this for a moment."

She produced a phone from her pocket, and began pressing buttons faster than Aru could comprehend, her fingers no more than a blur passing over the screen. Before long, she had found what she was looking for, and presented the phone to Aru, her chest puffed out with pride.

On the screen was a picture of a maid uniform. It was high quality, dyed sumptuous black with a pristine white apron. It was also very short. Aru felt breezy just looking at it.

"So, let's skip the formalities and get down to business. I think that with enough prodding, I can get QP into this thing. How much are you prepared to pay for pictures?"

"...Make me an offer," Aru said, making a steeple of her fingers.

"20 apiece?"

"20?! Listen,  _friend_ , I asked you to make me an offer, not make me angry," Aru growled, warming to her part. Arthur was a hard nosed, occasionally crooked businessman. Aru kept the Rbit room in business and still had enough left over to buy toys for the world's children at the end of the year. Negotiating was her strong suit. "For 20, I'd want fifteen minutes of lap pillow and the skirt would need to be at least two inches shorter."

Syura looked at her, blank eyed. Then, slowly, she began to smile. "You know what, Aru?" she said. "I think we're gonna get along _great._ "


	2. Free Lunch

Even in a world full of mythical beasts and godlike battle-maidens who could strike down the unworthy with only a few sparse clusters of glittering bullets, there was one rarity greater than any other: the legendary 'free lunch'.

Aru knew this. She knew that other, less savoury things often masqueraded as free lunches to trap the unwary, like a mimic assuming the form of a treasure chest before it gobbled down a greedy adventurer. But then bunny in red was, well, in the red, and a lunch she didn't have to pay for in cold, hard cash might be worth the price extracted.

“So, Aru,” Syura began, assuming her businesslike smirk. “I assume you want to know why I invited you for lunch today.”

“I want you to tell me what you want so I can refuse outright before we start negotiations,” Aru replied grumpily.

“That's why I like you, Aru. You always cut straight to the chase. Oh, Krila, if you're hungry you can eat the rolls.”

Krila, although bemused at being summoned by a girl she rarely interacted with, needed no encouragement. The lady in black was also, perenially, in the red.

Cleared of any obstacles to her moral dubiousness, Syura adopted her most businesslike voice, which was not particularly businesslike at all. “What I want in exchange for this lunch is very simple. From you, Aru, I want information. Specifically, how far you've gotten with QP. And Krila... well, I don't actually know what I want. I felt sorry for you, I guess. Just try to act like a normal person long enough to gossip with me about my best friend's love life, and we'll call it square.”

Krila nodded vigorously. “I shall make the attempt, but I warn thee, the mantle of banality may be too great for my dark soul to –”

“I'll take it. Aru, you can start.”

Aru glowered, and tapped her index finger against the pristine white tablecloth. “The answer is nil. We're friends. We were hungry at the same time and place. We ate lunch together. She paid. The end.”

The waiter arrived, brandishing breadsticks and condiments. Krila seized upon them with a force that might well have been demonic. Aru had never before seen a girl consume an entire breadstick without chewing, but she was pretty sure it broke public indecency laws. Aru and Syura looked at each other.

“Krila,” Aru said quietly, “Has anybody ever told you that you should consider performing at birthday parties?”

“With the right audience, I think we – I mean, you – could make a lot of money,” Syura added.

“Of course!” Krila said, squeezing her doll close to her chest. “I have performed my Dark Shadow Boundary Dance on numerous occasions. All I require is a sacrifice of tiny sausages and chunks of cheese, impaled on the same length of unholy wood.”

Aru decided that Krila was an utterly innocent babe and, as a gesture of mercy, decided to omit certain words in the last sentence from her memory.

After a moment of bemused silence, Syura returned to the point at hand. “But you went for lunch together! There was a time, a date, two pretty women that I most definitely don't feel attracted to on any level. There must be _details,_ and they have to have been scandalous. All details are.”

Aru looked around the crowded restaurant, at the linens and the candlesticks and the happily besotted couples surrounding their table, and began to worry about a number of things. Her stomach, however, continued to growl, and she settled for just appraising the nearest convenient escape route rather than fleeing immediately.

“What am I supposed to say?” she asked, holding her palms up. “The food was good. The company was good. We talked about socks. She has radical opinions on socks that I don't necessarily agree with and wouldn't want to repeat around innocent children.”

She broke off to look meaningfully at Krila, then continued.

“I don't really know what details you expect me to have, or how they could be anything interesting.”

Syura heaved a deep, indulgent sigh, like a teacher about to bestow a valuable lesson upon a wide-eyed schoolchild. “Well, there's the question of what restaurant it was, and who picked it. Remember before you answer that I'm buying you lunch.”

Aru groaned. _There_ was the leverage she had been expecting. If Syura decided she didn't want to pay, Aru didn't have the funds to cover it. She'd have to dine and dash, and as an upstanding citizen and as a business owner who understood the true weight of the transgression, she couldn't allow herself to do it. Her hands were tied. But, she thought, there was a way out. If she simply ate as many complementary breadsticks as she could, she could leave before the meal was served and still not be a bad person. It was a risk, since if she ate too many breadsticks and stayed she would ruin the value proposition of the meal by not being hungry, but it was a gamble she was willing to take.

“We went to that little tavern place by the market. The one where you sit on barrels instead of chairs. QP suggested it,” she answered at last, trying to sound as defeated as possible. If she seemed like she'd lost, she could maybe get away with being sparse with the details and Syura would assume there was nothing else to tell. She quietly stuffed a breadstick into her mouth.

Krila's eyes widened. “Oho! I happen to know that those barrels are in fact casks of dark essence, in which swim the Serpents of the Braided Venom Willows. You have my respect for surviving such a trial, as does the Holy Beast Maiden.”

“Krila, I don't know what you just said. I just heard a string of nouns,” Syura said cheerfully. “But what I _do_ know is that that place is _super_ romantic.”

Aru looked at the candlelit dinners being dispensed around them, and wondered if, like the average videogame character, Syura just didn't have the equip slots necessary for a sense of irony.

“What did you eat?”

“I had braised vegetables. She had steak.” Aru ate another breadstick.

“Ugh. That's so unfair. She should be, like, a ball of dough by now. You get meat, or you get sweets, one or the other. And if you get both, you get fat,” Syura groused. Krila, upon hearing sweets and steak being discussed in the same sentence, began to drool. “Did she try and make out with you?”

With the most absolute calm, Aru picked up her glass of water, took a hearty swig, and immediately sprayed it back out.

“Such commitment!” Krila murmured.

“I guess it's true what they say. A true artist makes their own opportunities rather than waiting for opportunities to show up,” Syura nodded.

Aru, having achieved the required dramatic effect, set her glower to stun. “Don't you think that question skipped a few steps? You could have asked if we held hands, or gazed deeply into each other's eyes, or anything, but you went straight to making out?”

Syura shrugged. “Go big or go home.”

“I agree! What would you rather face, Rabbit of Crimson Moons: a dragon, or a really _big_ dragon?” Krila asked.

“Right now I'd rather go home. I've had enough breadsticks to make this worth my time,” Aru said, standing up.

Syura's mouth hung open in a little gasp as she leapt to several conclusions, all of them wrong. “She did, didn't she? Did she have dog breath? I bet she had dog breath. You should carry some mints around in case she tries to kiss you. I know I do.”

Aru groaned, attracting suspicious looks from any number of surrounding lovebirds. “That is, in order, wrong, probably wrong, and _really weird_. I'm leaving.”

“Waitwaitwait _wait!_ ” Syura gasped, lunging over the table and catching hold of Aru's sleeve. The candle wobbled precariously and would have toppled, but for the timely intervention of Krila. With a speed and clarity that she had clearly purloined from a ninja, she shot out a hand and seized the candlestick. Unfortunately, she squandered any kudos from her endeavour by suddenly realising that not so very far from a sword, and immediately attempting to wield it in the name of the forces of darkness.

“Aru, I'm sorry. Listen, I probably pushed you too far, but... I just wanted to do the romantic gossip thing, like in all the VNs I read. I never get the chance to, because my best friend is QP and she's totally like a dense RPG protagonist when it comes to romance.”

“I agree with you there. She's like a dwarf star. You just can't avoid getting caught in her gravitational field.”

The two looked at each other and, for a moment, smiled. Krila stole a candlestick from another table and began dual wielding, finally living her lifelong dream of leveling in the rogue class, so that one day she could prestige into an assassin. For a brief moment, the world was at peace.

The chef, having heard the commotion, marched out of the kitchen with her kitchen knives in hand; Aru recognised her as Natsumi, and briefly marvelled at how small the world was. The knives began to fly, and the world returned to the natural order of things.

* * *

 

“Hi, Aru! I came again today. Hey, what happened to your face?”

QP, her face full of concern, pointed at the band-aid on Aru's cheek. The bunny winced, and searched for an excuse that didn't involve being violently ejected from a restaurant with two weirdos.

“I cut myself shaving,” she said, studiously looking in any direction apart from QP's.

“You shave?” QP asked, blinking.

“My legs, yes.”

QP's brain worked for a moment, before filing the anomaly under 'too much effort' and continuing on the path of the conversation she had planned on having. Aru noticed her fiddling with the hem of her dress, and felt her own heart sink.

“Sooooo, um, I don't know if you know this, but there's a rumour going around that you and Syura were eating together at a romantic restaurant, and I just wondered...”


	3. Fear Response

Arthur was not, by any means, a small man. If you took his ears into account – and it would be unwise for your continued wellbeing not to – he stood at almost seven foot. The bits of him that were not ears (which were surprisingly soft and delicate) were invariably made of tight, wirey muscle, the kind that back alley brawlers aspired to and chefs would discard as being too manly to cook.

As such, there wasn't too much that he was scared of. Certainly, there was Aru, but Aru seemed to inspire the same vague, existential dread in almost everybody she encountered. The girl always felt like she was judging you, and that her judgement had some pretty hefty weight attached to it. She also would occasionally go out at night and come back, bruised, swollen and scarred, with the excuse that she had had a sudden urge to go and fight bears. Arthur wasn't an idiot. He was fairly sure that she wasn't fighting bears, but he was also fairly sure that whatever fights she got into she won, and by a very wide margin at that.

He discovered his second fear on a peaceful Thursday afternoon, when a young man burst into the Rbit room sweating profusely and yelling. Arthur peered at him over the top of his sunglasses; the boy was wearing a school uniform, but not one that Arthur recognised.

“Where?! I saw him come in here!” the boy shouted.

Arthur put down the glass he had been polishing. He sometimes forgot he didn't work in a bar, and spent two to three hours polishing the same glass with a rag. It soothed his thirst for justice, in ways he could not even begin to fathom. “Oi, oi. Quit yelling in my shop. Now tell me what you want.”

The boy looked Arthur up and down; the rabbit saw the boy's eyes go to his feet, up to his face, his feet again, and then to the tips of his ears. Arthur grinned, and forsook his traditional slouch to stand up straight, a practice known in the world of shady business as 'looming'. Arthur was very good at looming, and was rewarded by the boy tensing his entire body at once.

Despite that, his voice was cool and languid when he spoke. “I saw a boy dressed in girl's clothes come in here. Where is he?”

“A boy?” Arthur snorted. “Listen. You and me might be the only males ever to have set foot in this shop. We have an exclusive clientèle. And trust me, kid – I don't think you're it. If you're looking for boys dressed as girls, look somewhere else.”

The boy's eyebrows narrowed. He had fine features – maybe a little too fine. But his shoulders, now that Arthur looked at them, were surprisingly broad, and his steps were a little heavier than they should be for a guy his height. The looked Arthur square in the eye, a defiant set to his jaw. The ceiling fan whirred overhead, pitifully straining against the humid summer air.

“That boy,” the young man said, touching his palm to his chest, “is my most precious person. If I have to fight you to get to him, then so be it.”

It was traditional, at this point, for there to be a moment of silence in which the challenge was allowed to resonate. Arthur was not particularly interested in tradition, and burst out laughing immediately. “Heh. That's somethin' else, kid. I don't know anything about this boy you're looking for, but I can see you're too dumb to listen to your seniors.”

“And I can see you're too ignorant to give up the game. This is why unrefined men like you make me sick. You have no respect for the finer feelings of a man's soul,” the boy spat.

Arthur felt his jaw grinding, and he took two very firm, deliberate steps towards his opponent. “You're real brave to come in here and talk to me about a _man's_ soul, _boy_. Lucky for you, I got a little sympathy left for idiots too dumb to back down. Come over here. I'll teach you how men settle things.”

He made a show of turning his back to the boy, and set down a stool on either side of the shop counter. They were good stools. He had once hit a man in the head with one and the stool very resoundingly won, to cheers from the audience. It went on to become champion of inanimate objects MMA for two consecutive years.

“We'll settle this with an arm wrestle. If you win, I'll help you look for this precious person of yours. If I win, you're going home.”

“And if I refuse?” the boy asked archly.

“Then you're a coward, and you're going home in an ambulance,” Arthur said, putting his elbow on the counter. “Your choice, kid.”

“Tch. Fine. But I won't hold back for a brute like you.”

With that, the boy did something that Arthur wasn't expecting: he started to quickly unbutton his shirt. The motions were practised, efficient. With one final flourish he tossed it to the floor, revealing a body packed with a surprising amount of muscle, glistening with sweat from his earlier running. He looked Arthur in the eye, and smiled wanly. “Having second thoughts?”

Arthur groaned. “Kid... this is getting' weird. I don't know if you did that to throw me or what, but it ain't gonna make your arm work any better.”

“What? Don't you have the confidence to do something like this? I thought you were a bigger man than that,” the boy taunted.

It was bait. Arthur knew it was bait. Rabbits knew bait when they saw it. But with all the testosterone and talk about men's souls, he wasn't about to let some skinny punk have anything over him. “I can't believe I'm doin' this. But men meet on a level playing field,” he said, undoing his collar.

That was why, when she came home from a lovely lunch and strode into the shop from the back entrance, Aru found two very sweaty, half-naked men holding hands and grunting profusely. But Aru, although rather a smaller rabbit than Arthur, was quite used to weird occurrences. She turned to QP, who had dropped her bag of shopping to the floor in absolute open-mouthed astonishment, and said, in the lowest voice she could muster, “Maybe we ought to come back later. A lot later. Maybe we could stay at your house...?”

Aru's lowest voice, however, was not low enough. The violet-haired boy glanced at her. He glanced at QP. His face did an interesting manoeuvre where it rearranged all its features twice before settling into the delighted expression a crocodile wears when something swims towards its jaws. He said one accusing, breathless word.

“Kyupita.”

Aru looked at QP. QP looked at Aru. Arthur looked at his opponent, who had ceased paying attention and had his hand smashed violently against the counter.

“Aru? I'm really, really sorry,” QP said, putting her shopping on the counter. Then, in a voice that was shaking perhaps a little too much to be called 'calm', she said something else.

“ _Hyper Mode._ ”

As the growing swell of luminous bullets overtook him and began shredding the structure of the shop, Arthur – at long last – found something he thought worthy of being feared.


	4. The Space Between

She grimaces, rolls a token between her forefinger and thumb. They’re surrounded, hemmed in by a wall of noise. Pennies fall through slots to be fired pneumatically and land atop an ever increasing tide of bronze, carrying prizes that will never fall. Slot machines vie for attention with harsh, manufactured noise. Somewhere there is the thump, thump, thump of a heavy footed dancer attacking the pad. A roiling, messy soundscape.

“I don’t get it.”

QP ignores her. As usual. QP has such a lot going on. She came back the other day having ‘saved pudding’, and has barely glanced at anybody since. What was lost during that time, Syura wonders? What had put such distance between them?

Even here in the arcade, Syura’s home turf, she doesn’t blink. The noise doesn’t affect her. She just plays, like Syura asked her to. Mechanical, efficient movements. A mind far from here.

“QP. I don’t get it.”

“You just dodge. Dodge and shoot. There isn’t anything else,” is QP’s reply. Her spaceship darts around the screen, weaving between walls of bullets. Syura lost all her credits on stage 3. This is stage 5.

“Not that. You. I don’t get you.”

For just a moment, QP’s expression softens. She looks uncertain. Troubled. But it’s only a second, a misstep in the march of time. The distance returns to fill the space.

“You don’t react anymore,” Syura says. Her voice is accusing, too accusing. She wants to take the words back and put them together better. Too late now. “You hate the arcade. You have sensitive ears, and the noise makes them hurt. All the flashing lights make it hard to focus. That was what you said before. Every single time.”

QP says nothing. Syura looks at the stains on the floor, the flickering lights, the gum stuck on the cabinets. Anywhere but her friend’s face.

“Syura… Listen,” QP says. Hesitant. Unsure. A stray bullet collides with her, but she ignores it. “I’ve been going through some changes lately.”

“Changes?” Syura scoffs. “It’s like you’re a different person. Like I barely know you.”

“I… got a job. A really important one. There’s so much to get used to, Syura. It’s taking up so much of my brain. So much of me.”

“So you’re putting your job before your friends? I didn’t think you were that sort of person.” The words are bare, tree branches in winter. Nothing can grow from words like that.

“It’s not my choice. It won’t be forever, okay? Just until I get used to it all.”

Syura says nothing, lets the sound of machines fill the gap between then. Inside, she’s panicking. It feels so serious. So unlike their other fights. If it won’t be forever, why does it feel so permanent? They’re standing right next to each other, but so far away.

“I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. You’re meant to be the straight-forward one. The happy one. Why are you like this?”

QP turns to her, and the pale-blue glare of the arcade cabinet bathes her features in an unreal light. “I don’t know, Syura. It isn’t your fault. It’s… It’s not like I hate you, okay? It’s nothing like that.”

Syura bites her lip, almost hard enough to draw blood. When did QP’s shoulders get so rounded, so hunched? When was her tail so listless, her eyes so red? Words are bubbling inside her. Too many words, all at the same time. How do you tell somebody you love them and you hate them at the same time?

“I… I’m not accepting this, okay? I don’t care what your job is. You can’t get rid of me just like that. It’s not alright.” Syura’s fists, balled at her sides, are shaking. She struggles to hold in hot, angry tears. “Keep playing that dumb game, QP. But when you get to school tomorrow, I’m gonna… I’m gonna beat you up. If I lose, I’ll beat you up the next day. I’ll fight you, and I’ll fight you, and I’ll fight you, until one day I knock some sense into your thick head and you get back to normal. You got that?!”

She turns tail, and flees. It makes her look like a child, but anything is better than letting QP see her face right now. QP watches her go; her hand stretches out as if to catch her, but her legs don’t move. She feels a growl building deep in her chest, a reckless anger.

“Sweet Breaker.”

She appears, or perhaps she was always there, her long hair falling down her back, a sympathetic frown on her face. Her voice is quiet, but cuts through the noise of the arcade like a blade. “Becoming a god is difficult, QP. I know.”

QP takes a step, two. Dangerously close. “I don’t _want_ this. You took away the thing I loved, and I took it back. Now everything is a mess.”

“If I hadn’t, pudding would have caused a catastrophe. I didn’t have any choice. Just like you have no choice,” Sweet Breaker replies. Her voice is not unkind. “It’ll be over in two weeks, a month. Maybe sooner.”

QP feels the growl building it, fights it down. “I hope you’re right. This isn’t fair to her. Or me.”

“She’s a good friend. She’ll wait,” Sweet Breaker says, and her voice is wistful. “I had a few like that. They don’t last forever, you know. You should make it up to her.”

She turns, takes a step behind one of the cabinets, and is gone: consumed by the lights, the noise. Only the memory of her lingers, melting like chocolate on the tongue. QP groans, surrounded and at the same time very alone. She rolls a token between her fingers, like Syura always does, before slotting it into the machine. She’ll need the practice. Two weeks, a month. Maybe less. Her hands move mechanically. Efficient. Her focus is almost divine. But yet… but yet…

Her ears hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written with a wordcount of 1000 words. I ended up discarding a lot of the more serious ideas here in favour of more comedy.


	5. Game Master

“QP, roll for diplomacy.”

A clatter of icosahedrons hit the table. There was enough table to hit. Despite her talents as a flying engine of death and sadness, QP had a laissez faire attitude to accuracy; usually she just fired wildly until whatever she was fighting strayed into her path, which would have been laughable if she didn’t output more bullets than a munitions factory. Thankfully, Syura had a dining table bigger than some train carriages, which meant QP hit more often than not.

As Syura totted up the roll and mangled the result with her formulae, Aru folded her arms across her chest. Aru did not, particularly, like role playing games. She hated pretending to be somebody she wasn’t. She hated pretending that she didn’t know things when she did. In short, she hated being reminded that she lived a double life already, and was never quite sure which half was the act – the half that was a cosmic holiday entity, or the half that had friends.

Still, the alternative had been letting QP and Krila brave Syura’s attentions alone. Krila had a beautiful, childish innocence that Aru found naturally endearing. QP had a set of legs that Syura had expressed designs on. Both of them needed to be protected, and the newly-minted Aru the Barbarian was just the bunny to do it.

Aru had only picked Barbarian because Syura assured her it was a simple class. It was, to a certain extent. QP had to worry about being a social maestro and casting the odd, intricately detailed spell or two; Aru, on the other hand, only had to worry about her thews, which were huge and glistening and entirely imaginary. Imaginary Aru was armed with a battleaxe that would no doubt have snapped Real Aru’s spine in half if she tried to lift it; real Aru, on the other hand, had armed herself with half a brick in a sock, a weapon revered by wizards the world over. Even Syura’s curiously dense skull would yield to the almighty brick-sock.

Unfortunately, even that hadn’t fully divested the pint-size poultry protector of her odd insistences, because shortly after everybody had picked their class, she had brought out a rail of cosplay equipment. QP – having wisely picked the class showing the least skin – was duly outfitted with a crown, a coronet and a carriage dress that left her looking like she’d strolled straight out of a history book. Aru? Aru got a faux fur tube top and a matching loincloth, because sartorial elegance was apparently a cross-class skill for a barbarian.

Syura, wrapped in the mysterious black cloak of a true game master, gave QP a prod. “Now you gotta make a persuasive speech, or the roll doesn’t count.”

“Dark Ninja Krilalaria! I, Princess QP, command you to do the stuff that the plot says I want you to do!” QP shouted. QP wasn’t particularly paying attention to the minutely detailed backstory that Syura had supplied, but she did enjoy shouting.

“And if I refuse, zam?” Krila replied, in a beautifully rendered stock villain voice.

“Then I won’t give you my melon bread at lunch tomorrow!”

“U-ugh… Servant of light, have mercy! To cast a famine on my people… You, bunny-eared barbarian! Have you nothing to say about this injustice?”

Aru nudged QP’s thigh under the table. “It does seem like we’re a lot more ruthless than the bad guys are.”

“That’s what being good _is_ , Aru. You give evil an inch, they’ll take a mile. It’s better to scare them away from trying by making a few examples. That way, there’s less fighting and less bloodshed,” QP said, flashing a pointed look at Syura, who had doubtlessly been given more inches than she deserved. “Besides, the alternative is for you to chop them in half. That doesn’t seem nice, either.”

Aru, although she would never admit it, could have gotten behind a brief spell of chopping people in half. Syura had gone into great detail about how the blade of her battleaxe was made of high grade, tempered steel, inlaid with with runic prayers to the various totems of Aru’s imaginary people. But she had yet to chop so much as an apple with it. QP, it turned out, was a dangerously efficient problem solver, using a combination of natural wiles, real life leverage and a blunt ignorance of the rules that Aru didn’t entirely believe was genuine.

Krila turned to Syura with teary eyes. When Syura asked her if she’d help out by roleplaying some of the villains, she’d jumped at the chance – not yet realising that the side opposite QP was not the wisest place to be. Syura sighed.

“Fine, fine. Dark Ninja Krilalariat submits and leads you to the treasure room. QP, you gain 100 exp. Aru, you gain 75 because you didn’t do anything and you were out of character.”

“Pardon me? How was I out of character?” Aru asked, glowering.

“You’re a barbarian,” Syura said, and shrugged her shoulders. “Barbarians are supposed to be all ‘rawrg’ and ‘BLOOOOOD!’ and stuff. You were super reasonable.”

“Now you’re just being classist! What’s wrong with a thoughtful barbarian? Look at my wisdom score! I could dual class as a philosopher with a score like that!”

“I still can’t believe how high your attribute rolls were,” Syura pouted. “If I didn’t know you so well, I would almost believe that you were _cheating_.”

“Yes, well,” Aru retorted, folding her arms across her chest, “If you knew me a bit better, you’d know that I always keep a lucky rabbit’s foot on my person. Two of them, in fact.”

The atmosphere in the room became icy. Thankfully, Krila had no sense of mood. “Master of Dungeons, may I return to being the cleric of the beast god?”

“Fine.”

Krila jumped out of her chair and crawled underneath the table, reappearing a good fifteen seconds later in the chair next to Aru. She took off her hachimaki and replaced it with a cardboard pope hat, and seemed vaguely out of breath.

Syura leafed through her notes behind the screen, stopping once every so often to tut loudly. “Alright, the ninja leads the bossy princess and the world’s laziest barbarian through the caves of slaughter that I wrote three entire encounters for and into the cave of Sacred Ninja Treasure. Among the mountains of scattered gold coins and glistening gems, three treasures stand out: the Orb of Balance, needed to revive the Chicken Goddess, a beautiful tiara glistening with rubies, and an axe with the head carved into the likeness of a roaring tiger.”

“I want to lore check the tiara,” QP said immediately, narrowing her eyes.

“You’re a princess, not a bard.”

QP, sensing Syura’s reluctance, immediately pounced. “Which means I have nothing better to do than sit around all day reading musty tomes of ancient lore. Oh, and I have plenty to pick from, because I have free access to the Royal Archives. Lore check, please.”

“Make it an assisted lore check. As a barbarian, enchanted weapons and equipment are very relevant to my interests, and I have the intelligence score and smithing proficiency to back it up. QP, would you like me to roll?” Aru interjected.

“Please do, my faithful bunnyguard.”

Aru let fly her die, and watched as it bounced its way to a formidable natural 20. Syura also watched, although she seemed markedly less pleased by the result. Just as Krila saw playing the villain as an exalted position of responsibility, Syura had assumed the mantle of a fair and just game master, and refused to let it go. According to her, cheating would breach the sanctity of the game – despite the kind words in the manual encouraging her to fudge the occasional roll or two.

“Ugh. You reach deep into the caverns of your collective skulls and realise that it matches the description of a legendary artefact, said to imbue the wearer with all the skill of a different class.”

“And?” QP prompted.

Syura’s eyes narrowed. “‘And’ what? You got your lore check.”

“How many times have we played games together, Syura? How many cups of pudding have fallen under our deadly spoons? I know you, and I know you’re hiding something,” QP said imperiously. She turned to Aru, and began to apply puppy dog eyes. QP had a natural aptitude for puppy dog eyes. “Aru, may I ask you to try on this tiara?”

Aru clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “I don’t know, QP. It might be dangerous, in more ways than one. Besides, I’m a big, macho barbarian, right? It’d take a lot to convince me to profane my mighty thews by wearing a tiara, especially if that tiara might remove said thews.”

Aru’s concerns were genuine, but there was another factor in the equation. Across the table, Syura was looking at her with desperate eyes, begging her to – just this once – take her side. It played across her conscience; Syura, despite having the authority, hadn’t cheated them for the entire game, whereas she and QP had combined forces to bend or ignore the vast majority of the rules.

“Very well. I am not an unreasonable princess, my dear bodyguard; I have heard your concerns, and I will offer you a grand banquet at the royal mansion when this adventure is over. I will also,” QP said, untying one of her many ribbons, “offer you your princess’s favour, to carry into battle with pride.”

Krila shot her hand up. “I, the cleric of the beast god, offer up my body in defence of our princess! I shall try on the tiara, and receive –”

“Krila, you don’t have to. You’ve already earned yourself a box lunch with two cups of pudding.”

“But,” Krila said, her one uncovered eye glistening with tears, “The game master didn’t put any treasure appropriate to my station in the cave.”

Syura felt the combined eyes of Aru and QP drilling into her skull. Very deliberately, she rolled a dice behind her screen. “Oh, look! Somebody just made a spot check!”

“How very convenient,” Aru murmured.

“The tiara is in fact dangling from a… uh… ebonwood staff of dark power, the likes of which have never been seen before! What mysterious spells could be hidden within?”

“I make a lore che–”

Aru clapped her hand across QP’s mouth, and quietly shook her head. “My goodness! Dark Cleric Krilalariat, it seems that your energies have revealed this magical staff, which nobody else could see. Surely you are the destined wielder of this staff.”

Krila was innocent to the extreme, but Aru would have been very surprised if she didn’t realise that her friends were trying to make it up to her. Her face settled into what, as near as it could muster, was a satisfied smile. QP, Syura, and Aru all looked at each other, having been drawn into a united front of Krila appeasement, and the mood of the room seemed to tend towards reconciliation.

“Alright. I’m going to try on the tiara. Not because I think it’s cursed, or a trap, but to show my loyalty to our princess. Also, I could use a class change. These stats are wasted on a barbarian, and this faux fur stuff itches like crazy,” Aru said. “Oh… But come to think of it, I beseech thee, my princess: when the royal banquet is thrown, I have two valued guests I would like to bring with me.”

“I, Princess QP, accept these terms.”

Syura sighed. Aru had offered her a compromise, and she knew it. “I understand. The barbarian Aru takes the tiara and places it on her head. In a blinding flash of light, she becomes smaller, more beautiful. She wears a headdress, and a long black dress covered by an apron; responding to the Princess’s wishes, the tiara has transmogrified Aru the Barbarian into an elegant maid.”

QP shook her head sadly. “Sorry, Aru,” she whispered. “I had a feeling she was going to do this.”

“It’s fine. I’m wearing a tube top and a loincloth, so anything is an upgrade,” the bunny shrugged. “Krila, can you find the maid outfit for me? I need to read up on my new class. It better still be able to use battleaxes.”

Aru stood up, and walked over to Syura to collect her character sheet. Casting her eyes around, she gave the diminutive girl a comforting pat on the head. “Sorry, Syura. I got you in on the banquet, at least.”

“You did.”

“Are you mad?”

“Not really. It’s hard to win against QP.”

“Hmm… This is…?! My eye! The eye of Krilalaris is reacting!” Krila shouted. Krila was not as good at shouting as QP was, but was by no means bad. “The fingerprints of the creator are inscribed upon this garment!”

“Krila… Sorry. I’m tired. Can you speak actual words and sounds for once?” Syura asked, wearily.

Krila jumped atop the table, brandishing the maid cosplay at Syura. “I serve the dark gods, but that servitude takes many forms! Behold, the insignia of this sealed eye!” She turned out the label with a flourish.

“‘Sealed Eye Cosplay Fashions’… Wait, is that you?!” Syura asked, her mouth agape.

“Ohohohoho! Do not think dollmaking is the extent of my power, human! You have my thanks, for you are ignorant of the true dark power of this clothing. For you, it is simply a maid outfit… for me, it was three weeks of relief from the dark hunger that consumes my soul. I feasted on the bread of life, and became stronger than I have ever been before! Ohohohoho!”

Syura blinked. She blinked again. And then, finally, she smiled. “I… see. What a small world. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to demonstrate those powers again for me? There are a few things I want to add to my cosplay rack…”

As Syura and Krila began to hammer out the details of a new and flourishing business relationship, Aru turned to QP. “Well, I think the adventure is over for today. I never got to actually use my battleaxe.”

“Yeah. I think you’ll make a great maid, though. I’ll be looking forward to next session,” the dog girl said. “I’ll braid your hair and tie it with the ribbon you earned, and you can bring me cups of pudding. It’ll be great.”

“Next time, hm? Well, I suppose I could go for one more.”

“Of course! Your princess commands it!”

“That only works in the game, you know.”

“Aww…”

Aru hadn’t used her battleaxe. But she hadn’t used her half-brick in a sock, either. She considered that a good day’s adventuring. She hoped that the next time would go just as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the things that didn't make it into this collection are various drabbles; one of them had a DnD theme, and a friend asked me to expand on the idea into a full piece.


	6. Understand

Her hands are cold, but the coffee is hot inside the styrofoam cup. She can’t drink fancy coffee. She’s ridden out too many nights on instant coffee granules, gotten used to the taste of burnt robusta. She doesn’t have the palette for fine arabica, or the wallet. She takes a sip, grimaces, takes another.

“Syura, I don’t get why you drink that stuff if you don’t like it,” QP says. QP has a soda, but she’s busying herself with trying to pick the ice cubes out by sucking on them through a straw.

“QP,” she says, putting on her lecturing professor voice, “Sometimes, in order to become what you want, you gotta act like you already are that thing. I wanna be a sophisticated lady who can drink coffee, so I’m drinking coffee.”

QP scratches her head, takes another bite of her burger. Fidgets in the ugly plastic seats. “I don’t get it,” she says, finally.

“It’s like… if you’re trying to level up as a mage in an RPG. At first, you’re bad at it, but then, because you cast spells, which is what a mage does, you get good at casting spells because you have lots of practice. So you become a mage!”

QP’s ears flicker as the words pass into one and then straight out of the other. Her simplicity is both a blessing and a curse; on one hand, it means she doesn’t worry about complicated things. But on the other hand, it means she can’t empathise with people who do. It’s one of the things that makes her a little distant from everybody, even though she’s friendly and cheerful.

But it’s not just the complexity of the thought that passes her by. At a time where everybody in school is floundering around in search of their identity, QP already knows hers. She’s happy with what she is, what she’s to become. The idea that ‘you are what you do’ is of no use to her; instead, it’s ‘you do what you are’. Down in the pit of her stomach, Syura squeezes the little ball of envy she has for her best friend a little tighter. If only everybody could be so natural, so easy-going.

“How’s the food?” she asks instead.

“Awful. I like chicken better.”

“You leave my babies alone. That’d be like me eating rabbit in front of you.”

“Why don’t they serve pudding? I’d buy it.”

Ah, pudding. Syura wondered when the conversation would turn to it. QP’s passion for pudding seems to consume everything at some point or another. Pudding is nice. Delicious, even. But Syura can’t understand the deep, undying love that QP has for it. It’s not like a game, where every line of code has to be scrutinised, where there are a thousands facets and if any of them isn’t polished just right, the game as a whole will fail to shine. Pudding is pudding is pudding.

“Didn’t you have pudding for lunch, anyway?”

“Two cups,” QP nods, proudly. As if it’s something to be proud of. “I wanted to give my bread to Krila again, so I packed an extra so I wouldn’t get hungry.”

“You really do have pudding for brains,” Syura replies, affectionately.

That’s the problem, in a lot of ways. Syura can’t understand pudding. She can’t even understand rabbits. But those are the things that QP loves, more than anything else in the world. It’s not bad to listen to her talk about them. Her enthusiasm is nothing if not infectious, a beautiful stream of babbling that usually doesn’t make any sense. But on some level, pudding is one of the walls that separate them. There’s no room in QP’s heart for anything else. Not games. Not even Syura.

That’s why she’s jealous of QP. Because QP doesn’t think about the complicated things. The past, the future. She lives in the present, loves in the present. She doesn’t know that this can’t last. She doesn’t know that, sooner or later, they’re going to drift apart. No more fights. No more hanging out in terrible burger joints, no eating pudding and playing games late into the night. Just a slow, gradual farewell as they float further and further out of each other’s reach, pushed apart by the tides of life.

That isn’t what Syura wants. She can’t think of anything she wants less. But it’s already happening, little by little. That’s why she drinks coffee until her hands shake, stays up late into the night typing lines of code to pore over later with fresher eyes. That’s why she records every cooking show, scouring them for pudding recipes. She wants to make something that will draw QP closer to her. She wants to become somebody who understands what QP loves. QP can’t do it. The clay of her has already set; she is who she is, and she’ll never be anybody else. Syura’s identity is still being made. She still has time.

“Hey, Syura. Are you alright? You’ve been quiet for a while.”

She can feel the breeze from QP’s tail swishing beneath the table. What should she say? The things on her mind aren’t the kind of things QP worries about.

“Ah, my tummy hurts. Maybe the food here is bad after all,” she shrugs, and hopes her smile is wide enough, her eyes sincere. “Sorry if you were getting bored.”

“Why would I get bored? You worry about the stupidest stuff, Syura. I like hanging out with you. I even like watching you play games. You always have the funniest reactions,” QP says. “Hey, hey. Wanna know a secret?”

“Sure?”

“I lied earlier when I said I had two puddings for lunch,” QP says, winking, and stealthily takes a cup of pudding from her bag. “Here. Maybe it’ll ease your tummy ache?”

“It always comes back to pudding with you,” Syura sighs, half smiling, half annoyed. The gesture is far from lost on her. She picks up her spoon, and tries, desperately, to understand.


	7. Season's Greetings (I)

Snowflakes spiralled down from dark, billowy clouds, dusting the chimneys and rooftops like icing sugar on gingerbread houses. The stars were silent and dim, the moon hid her face; the only light came from the lights strung between lampposts, red-green-red-green, a Christmas wreathe that sat on the shoulders of the entire town.

In short, it was Christmas, the time of year when Aru ceased to be a humble shopkeeper and instead became a bundle of quivering nerves held loosely together by duty, adrenaline and a pair of thigh-high striped stockings. The wonder was not that she managed to deliver presents to worthy children the whole world over, but that she had so far managed to avoid spontaneously combusting from pure, unleaded anxiety.

Being Santa, as it turned out, was a big responsibility. Maybe that was why everybody thought he was fat – so the weight of that responsibility could be spread out over more square inches, like how camels had huge feet to spread their weight out over the sand. Aru, sadly, was not fat, although not for lack of trying. Before she became Santa, she had been adorably plump, the very picture of a snuggly, plushy bunny. Then she went on her first Christmas run, where she’d burned nearly half her body weight in calories in a single night of frantic present distribution. It became clear that the plates of cookies and milk that children obligingly left out were not just a perk of the job, but an essential method of refuelling.

Still, there were perks to the job. For example, she never needed to buy home decoration magazines, because she’d seen the inside of almost every home on planet Earth, and was never short of ideas for funky shoe racks and well-meaning but ultimately foolish DIY projects. There were great travel opportunities, and an unlimited amount of air miles as standard. There was the absolute adoration of everybody under six, the grudging respect of everybody from six to twelve, and the wistful longing of every child who’d been told she didn’t exist.

She was taking a break to enjoy one of her perks, although she felt a vague sense of guilt about it. This year had been an easy one. She had, through a mixture of intimidation and persuasion, recruited Nico as Santa’s Helper again, and splitting her bag between two bunnies had made the work much faster. She’d still done maybe three quarters of the route herself – Nico would need a lot of practice before she became worthy of wearing Santa’s stockings. But it had left her with a little time before the dawn, and that was all she had really wanted.

As a rule, Aru always did her own town last. It didn’t really matter, but she felt very strongly that it meant she was living up to some international code of Santa conduct: thou must be impartial, abiding by the letter of the List. Doing her own hometown last left no room for favouring them; she couldn’t swap their presents with better ones, because she had no better ones left. She wasn’t putting them first in case she couldn’t finish her route. It meant she could enjoy the smiles of children around her for the rest of the year, knowing that she needn’t feel like she needed to distance herself for the sanctity of her office.

Of course, it followed down the chain. Of all the people in her hometown, she did her friends last. She had stolen across Syura’s roof, careful to leave a footprint on her roof with a size nine boot she kept specifically for that purpose. She had shimmied down Krila’s chimney holding a wrapped sewing machine close to her chest. Now, finally, she had reached the very last name on her list.

“Merry Christmas, QP,” she whispered, pulling the bedroom door shut just enough that the light didn’t fall on her friend’s face.

Aru was vaguely aware that going into somebody’s bedroom at the dead of night to look at them while they slept was edging into weird, stalker-y territory, even if they happened to be your close friend and even if your stated profession was breaking into people’s houses to give them things. In her defence, she couldn’t help it. QP’s house was not very large; she didn’t _quite_ live in an actual dog house, but it was getting there. Her kitchen was a clutter of pans with no cupboards for a home, and her living room was more of a storage facility. (The refridgerator, home of pudding, was enshrined in its own little nook, spotlessly clean). As a result, QP had no room for a towering fir to celebrate the holiday. But she kept a bonsai tree on her bedside table, and it had been loving draped in tinsel; it would have to do.

“Sorry I can’t come to your Christmas Party,” Aru said, her voice even lighter than her footsteps. “I’m always so tired on Christmas Day. Even if I came, I’d just be boring, and haggard. I don’t want you to see me like that.”

QP said nothing, because she was exploring an enchanted dream world of pudding and jam and mailmen who didn’t run quite as fast as she did. It was, of course, phenomenally silly to sit and apologise to a girl who was softly snoring and rolled into a small, snuggable crescent, but Aru was no stranger to doing silly things in the middle of the morning.

It was also, of course, very silly to tiptoe across the floor instead of hovering soundlessly above it, or to speak at all, for fear of outing herself as a cosmic gift entity. Part of her thought it wouldn’t be so bad to be caught… after all, who would believe QP if she told anybody? If QP told anybody at all? It would be refreshing to let the secret out, just this once. Refreshing, but impossible.

QP rolled over, her hair spilling over her face, her chin held toward the ceiling like a dog asking for a scratch. Aru sighed. Perhaps another time. Today was still Christmas, and she still had her job to do. Reaching into her sack, she took what she was fairly sure was a monogrammed dessert spoon and slipped it under the bonsai tree, before retreating as quietly as she had come.

In the kitchen, she found the expected plate of cookies and milk (with the obligatory carrot, which she split with the ReBits), and a note, written in QP’s childish scrawl, the i’s dotted with hearts.

_Dear Santa,_

_Hi! I’m QP. Thank you for all the presents you’ve given me. I wanted to get you a present back, but I didn’t know what you’d like, so I left some pudding in the fridge for you instead. You can have as much as you like._

_Merry Xmas_

Aru smiled to herself. Pudding for Christmas. Of _course_ it was QP’s go-to gift. Well, she wasn’t complaining. She turned the note over, sourced a pen from a cup that QP had decorated with macaroni and glitter, and began to write.

_Dear QP,_

_You’re a good kid. Thank you very much for thinking of me. I’ll only take one cup of pudding. I need to watch my weight, or I won’t be able to fit down the chimney next year. If you keep being good, I might actually stop and say hi in a couple of years when you’re all grown up. Until then!_

_Your friend, Santa_

_p.s. Don’t let Syura catch you under the mistletoe._

She put down the pen, folded the note twice, set it on the table. Took a deep breath, and fought the urge to put the note in her pocket and spirit it away. The second thoughts had come instantly. Was it okay for her to reveal herself, even once QP had grown up? She didn’t know. The thought of it seemed cataclismic to her. But so did the thought of more years of secrets. She sighed; the orange dawn had begun to spread like watercolours over the sky. There was no more time to worry about it. She took up her sack, grabbed one of QP’s many, many assorted puddings from the fridge, and fled with the last remnants of the night.

* * *

 

It was late afternoon when Aru woke up, with her phone buzzing like a wasp next to her aching head. A groan escaped her like a prisoner breaking free of its shackles, rumbling all the way through her body.

“H’llo? Who izzit?” she asked, accepting the call. Her words were slurred, her eyes bleary.

“ _Aru?”_

“Oh, QP. It’s yoooooouuu,” Aru replied, although a yawn spirited away the last syllables. “S’rry I couldn’t be at the party…”

“ _Don’t worry. It’s fine. Hey, Aru?”_

There was a moment’s silence. On the other side of the phone, Aru was sure, QP would be be slowly swishing her tail, her brow scrunched in concentration.

“ _You know I can recognise your handwriting, right?”_

There were probably a number of appropriate reactions, none of which Aru did. What she did instead was open her window and launch her phone out of it as hard as possible, before sitting down on her bed and trembling as if she’d jumped in an ice bath.

For Christmas, Aru had gotten a single cup of pudding and a big, big problem. It promised to be an interesting year.


	8. Watchdog

The warm sun through thick, heavy windows. A close heat. She feels sweat on the nape of her neck, loosens the scarf at her throat. Her ears are pricked for the sound of a bell, two flat taps of the hammer before a ringing cry that echoes up and down the hallways of the school. She’s had her fill of class, and of homework, and of the tireless hand-wringing of her teachers and of the strange, ever present face of the caretaker. She has business to attend to. When the moment comes, she can’t suppress the habitual wag of her tail. She packs her things quickly and clumsily, stuffs handfuls of notepaper into her satchel.

“You’ll break your pencils,” Syura warns, smiling as always. She spent the whole class playing games on her phone under the desk – probably some racing game with tilt controls. Tilt controls are Syura’s new fad, a passion that will envelop her for maybe three weeks before evaporating, as if it were never there. Three weeks, QP knows, is enough time to create some half-finished, bug-ridden, programmer art laden facsimile of a demo that she will later be forced to play.

“It’s Friday,” she says, by way of response, and carries on cramming pencils into her bag. She rarely ever draws anything, but she does enjoy chewing the ends. Pencils with erasers on them are the highest form of heresy she can imagine. When she occasionally succumbs to the temptation to do a sketch, she is always struck by how unwieldy the pencil feels in her hand, how the lines never seem to behave quite the way she wants them to, how the paper is a poor substitute for the canvas of her mind. No doubt she would improve with practice, but part of her is already resigned to never being an artist. Perhaps she’s simply too happy-go-lucky for something requiring so much dedication.

“I know, I know. You’re busy after school on Fridays,” Syura sighs, and leans against her desk. She loosens her collar, fans her slender neck with her hand. As always, her uniform is crumpled. Her parents are never home, and her attempts at using an iron herself have been less than satisfactory. Still, QP thinks, it gives her a certain mad scientist air to go with her all-consuming passion for creating games. (QP’s opinions are, perhaps, a little charitable; common consensus is that the effect is less ‘mad scientist’ and more ‘dragged to school through a hedge’.) “Make it up to me tomorrow. Let me tie your hair in pigtails again.”

She grimaces, but agrees. An accord has been struck, and Syura’s odd whims satisfied; the rest of the day is to do what she wishes, without distractions. Their goodbyes are the quick, affectionate goodbyes of old friends who will see each other again soon.

As one, the collective student body rushes out into the warm air and breathes deeply, greedily, as a swimmer breathes after their first big dive. A day where the sun shines even after class is a beautiful treasure, not to be wasted. QP trails behind them, sticking largely to pools of shade beneath shop awnings and cool dark alleyways. She’s no fan of the heat. If she were a dog – a real dog, with four paws and a collar – her nose would dry out and she’d just lie on the ground, panting. As it is, she just looks forward to a shower when she gets home, and changing into something less stuffy than her school uniform. In her heart, she wishes she could take to the sky, and enjoy the cooler air near the clouds, but it would attract too much attention.

It isn’t that what she’s doing is wrong, of course. In fact, it’s something of a public service. But it’s… sensitive. Not the kind of thing she wants to advertise. It’s more of a routine, nowadays. A show of form. Either that, or a mess she’s gotten herself into that she hasn’t figured out how to escape yet.

Slowly, she makes her way towards the outskirts of the city, where the shops begin to look less and less appealing, and the people more and more shabby. There is a greyness about the place, that persists even in the height of summer, never dulled by sunshine or papered over by rain or snow. For want of a better word, it feels tired. It has done ever since she was a child, when she wandered into one of the run-down little pet shops and fussed over their rabbits. The owner, although initially annoyed, had eventually been swept away by her enthusiasm and had even given her a box of juice when she left.

Today, she winds through the streets away from the pet shop, towards an old bar that looks as though it has seen better days (and has looked that way since it was built). Burnt orange bricks with crumbling mortar, and a barely functional neon sign: those are what mark out the Tread and Thimble. She assumes it was once the Thread and Thimble, but the H has been gone for as long as she can remember – as if it had never existed at all. It’s the kind of place that has six different draught beers, but nobody is stupid enough to try them.

She steps inside, letting the swing doors close heavily behind her. The first time she came her, she was terrified. It was not the kind of place where beautiful women, like herself, were supposed to venture. But as Friday upon Friday passed, she began to realise that the character of the bar was not unlike the rest of the area – cantankerous, but legitimately trying to drag itself upwards hand over hand and fist over fist.

She’s greeted by the crack of snooker balls being broken, the first shot of a brand-new game. She hears the distinctive but chaotic pattern of thuds as a formation of balls scatters and bounces against the soft baize cushions. It’s a very clean break. Very efficient. She hears a lone ball fall into a pocket, and knows at once who it must have been.

Leaning over the table – almost lounging – is Yuki, dressed casually in a black vest and tight, dark jeans. Her fingers, supporting the tip of the cue in an open bridge, are long and slender, like her bared arms. She looks lithe, graceful. Adult. A pang of jealousy settles itself in QP’s heart. It annoys her that even though Yuki is a bully, she has a type of beauty that neither herself nor Syura can ever really hope to aspire to.

“You came again,” Yuki says, without looking at her. Her voice is low, for a woman’s, with just the faintest touch of a burr. It always seems as though there is a rolling growl in her words, a subtle hint of aggression. Maybe she’s just purring, QP thinks, but there’s not really much to purr about. “Teddy. It’s a hot day. Get the little girl a lemonade.”

There it is. The playful way she does something, just to raise QP’s hackles. She feels a low growl building in her throat. “Hey! In a couple of years, I’ll be just as big as you. Maybe even bigger,” she says, although nobody pays her much mind. The bartender has already begun to move, tossing ice in a glass and filling it with swift motions. He slides the drink across the length of the bar in a practised motion, and it slides to a halt in front of her.

“You’re already bigger than me across the waist,” Yuki says, scratching her cheek. She takes a careless shot, and another ball is claimed by the side pocket. “Hey, Teddy. Didn’t I say to get a sippy cup for her?”

“I heard she got mad and wrecked a shop downtown the other week. Her friend ran it,” Teddy says, shrugging his broad shoulders. “I don’t have money to replace the bar.”

“That was different,” she says, trying her best to be comforting. “I had to deal with a stalker that day. I won’t wreck your bar, Mr. Teddy.”

“Stalker, huh? No accounting for taste. You know what you should, kid?” Yuki asks, sending another ball spiralling with a grand flourish. It’s a little too grand, and the target doesn’t quite reach the pot. She hisses, before clicking her tongue against her teeth and continuing. “Join Waruda. You join my organisation, and I can guarantee you’ll never see that stalker again. I ever teach you how to gaslight somebody?”

QP shakes her head, folds her arms a little defensively. “It doesn’t matter how many times you ask. I’m not joining.”

“Worth a shot,” the cat shrugs. “Drink your lemonade, kid. It’d look suspicious if you died of dehydration in the same room as me.”

She pouts, but the day is too hot, and the bar too stuffy, to argue any further. She gives the barman a sidelong glance. “Mr Teddy? May I please have a straw?”

It’s almost impossible to see the barman’s smile beneath his moustache, but it’s there. He rummages around in the cubby-holes behind the bar before eventually producing a plastic silly-straw with a corkscrew loop in the middle, which he hands to her with strange gravity. “You’re a good kid.”

“I know. That’s the problem. If she weren’t such a goody-two shoes, she could be my third in command. Maybe even second in command, if she grows a brain,” Yuki grouses. Her opponent has missed his shot, and she’s capitalising on the opportunity furiously. “Why do you even keep coming here, if you’re not going to join?”

It’s a fair question, and one that QP has found asking herself. The bar is well out of her way. She has no friends here, no real interest in snooker or darts or whatever other bar games Yuki likes to play. She could be at home, eating pudding, or with Aru or Syura or Krila. Instead, she’s here.

“You’re dangerous, and it’s my job to keep an eye on you.”

Yuki snorts as she hits the ball; if she weren’t playing a game, it probably would have been a full-blown laugh. “Your job, huh? But only on Fridays after school, and only if I helpfully agree to come to the same place every week. Boy, the world’s really in trouble when you gotta get a real job and can’t watch me play games once a week.”

QP takes a long sip of her lemonade, relishes the icy chill working its way to her stomach. “Shut up. What would you even make me do in Waruda, anyway? I don’t like cheating or hurting people.”

Yuki turns and gives her a devilish smirk. For a moment, she looks dazzling. But her vest top is clinging to her body, and she has the beginnings of a tan on the tip of her nose; the heat affects her like it does anybody else.

“That’s the beauty of it, squirt. I’d have you do _nothing_. Absolutely _nothing_. Just set you up on a little payroll from some of our casino heists. Nothing big enough to be suspicious. Just enough to keep you with a good supply of pudding and a place to live. And then, when the time comes for Waruda to make our move? You just sit back, and keep doing nothing. No interfering, no adventures. You just say you were sick that day. Nobody could blame you.”

“Everybody wins?” QP asks, with a sarcastic edge in her voice.

Yuki returns to the table, and pots the last balls in quick succession. She’s been messing around the whole time, and her opponent knows it. “There’s no such thing as ‘everybody wins’, kid. Life’s like a game, and every game has a loser.”

“Video games don’t have a loser,” QP says loyally, Syura’s little ahoge appearing in her mind’s eye.

“In video games, the loser is always you. You either lose to the game, or you beat the game and lose your entertainment,” Yuki shrugs. “Here, take a cue. I’m going to teach you how to break. It’s an important life skill.”

“Is it really?” she asks, taking a cue anyway. The cat quickly resets the balls, with motions she’s practised a thousand times, and before long QP is leaning across the table, the cue between the points of her fingers, weighing her shot.

“Sure it is. You know why I’m in Waruda, an organisation for bad kids? Because when I was in school, I never wanted to study. All I wanted to do was play. When I left school, I still just wanted to play, so they called me a bad adult – because I didn’t wanna grind my life away doing something I didn’t enjoy. You ever hear of ‘karoshi’? Death through over work. That’s the kind of world we live in,” Yuki says, and for once her voice sounds sad and far-away. “And the schools I hated are still there, producing diligent, goody-two shoes kids like you who grow up and get sucked into the machine.”

“You sound super biased. Besides, I’m too laid back to be diligent,” QP says, after a moment.

“Good. Stay that way. Don’t quit playing when you get to be an adult, and we might just get along even if we’re not on the same side. Here,” she says, leaning over the table to match QP’s profile, putting her long, elegant fingers over QP’s childish hands. “Hold the cue further down, like this.”

In a fluid movement, the ball is struck and the break complete. Not as clean, or as elegant, but still done. Yuki’s hand lingers over QP’s for just a moment longer, before she goes to the other end of her table and takes up her customary title as the rival. A rival, Yuki thinks, is just another name for a teacher – and she’s going to teach QP how to play, and how to lose.


	9. Season's Greetings (II)

Aru considered herself to be a bunny of the world. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure what the idiom meant, but she had certainly _seen_ the world, albeit from lower Earth orbit. Either way, she had accrued a measure of social wisdom on her travels through life, and distilled it down into a rudimentary Ten Commandments of Polite Conversation. The first, and most important, was that you must never, ever, start a conversation with the words ‘I can explain’.

“I can explain,” she said.

In her own defence, it was harder to remember such things when startled, and QP had decided to start their serious conversation by barrelling into the shop at top speed, leaning over the counter and bellowing “ _EXPLAIN YOURSELF!”_ at the top of her lungs. QP had the lung capacity of a pro athlete, or perhaps an opera singer, and the sound of the accusation rang in Aru’s ears. Also not helping was the fact that the dog girl insisted on standing with her nose no more than half a centimetre away from Aru’s.

As a result, a lot was happening inside the bunny’s head. Her animal brain was charting an escape route from the shop and wondering if she could run faster than QP could follow. The bit of her mind that was actually sane and intelligent was trying to piece together a decent way to break the news that she was, in fact, a cosmic christmas entity that silently judged every child on an arbitrary scale of morality and allocated presents accordingly. A very small part of her was discovering that QP’s hair smelled of candy canes, and filing this information away for later enjoyment. All these different segments were fighting for her attention, and her wires were becoming well and truly crossed.

“Start talking,” QP growled, her ears flat against the top of her head. “What was that weird note you wrote me? And why did you _steal_ the delicious pudding I set aside for Santa?”

Aru inhaled deeply. This wouldn’t be so hard. QP was her friend, and besides that, she was a good natured girl at heart. All she had to do was defuse the (quite understandable) hostility, then approach the matter from the side and very gently insinuate the truth. If she dropped enough hints, QP would eventually draw the conclusion herself, and then Aru wouldn’t feel guilty for having told her. It would be a win-win situation; QP would get her answer, and Aru would get to stop living a double life to fool her best friend. All she had to do was not put her foot in her mouth.

“Actually, I’m Santa.”

All of a sudden, Aru realised that she had very big feet.

QP frowned. QP was doing some vigorous mental calculations about how big Santa was and how big Aru was and how many Arus could fit inside of Santa’s belly. The answer was multiple, if you had multiple Arus to waste. Even by QP’s math, that wasn’t a satisfactory answer, but Aru wasn’t a liar, even if she did break into people’s houses at night and eat their food and watch them while they were sleeping.

Aru, meanwhile, had decided not to panic. Actually, she had gone right through panic and had settled at the still, bleak calm that some people experience in the seconds before they die. She was dangerously close to losing a valued friend (not to mention her favourite customer), and it put her in the same frame of mind she had when she was navigating whirling mazes of glittering bullets. It was a feeling that endured even as she watched QP open her mouth to pronounce judgement.

“Prove it,” she said. “Prove you’re Santa.”

Aru chewed her lip. It was never _easy_ , was it? When she’d been flying out and about last Christmas, everybody just believed she was Santa at the drop of a hat. Now she had to put together a court case to convince easily the most innocent and credulous girl she knew. It was, at least, better than a flat rejection of the possibility, followed by a “Yeah but really though, why were you in my house stealing my food?”, although she had rather been hoping for something more along the lines of “Obviously my good friend has become over-stressed by the travails of a shopkeeping life, and subsequently done a reverse backflip from the diving board of sanity into the olympic pool of reduced mental acuity, and I will therefore afford her a measure of sympathy.”

“Are you asking me to do Christmas again? It comes once a year. That’s part of the sanctity of Christmas. Don’t ask me to violate Christmas,” she said, although she was more bartering for time than anything else.

“No! I would never do that. But if you’re Santa, you should know all sorts of Christmas secrets nobody else could know, right?” QP asked, her eyebrows twitching. “So if you can answer some questions, I might believe you. First question: what did I get for Christmas when I was eight years old?”

The answer sprang into Aru’s mind, as easily as if it had been there on the tip of her tongue the entire time. It was always like that with Christmas matters – as though there were an infinitely deep well of knowledge quietly sitting in the core of her being, waiting for her to dip in her cup and drink of it. She knew things about people she had never heard of, deeds that were so tiny and infinitesimal that no sane person would note them. The List was not written on a piece of paper. The List was written in the very fibres of her, and of Santa. It was greater than she was, and greater than she wanted to comprehend.

“You got a lump of coal that year,” Aru said.

“That’s right, but what gives? I was super nice! I ate all my greens in December, and I even took out the trash!” the dog pouted.

Aru scratched the back of her head. “Yes, but you kept tying Syura to the school flagpole by her braids.”

“Auuu… She deserved it. She kept putting clothes pegs on my ears whenever I fell asleep in class!”

“She also got a lump of coal that year, by the way.”

QP’s mouth formed the tiny ‘o’ of a woman betrayed. “She told me she got a _mountain bike!_ ”

She couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “Yes. A mountain bike you’ve never seen and that she’s never used. Why would I give a mountain bike to a girl who can fly, anyway?”

QP looked away, defeated. Her initial anger seemed to be dissipating, replaced by a slowly dawning curiosity. But her suspicions remained.

“Third question!” QP yelled, having casually skipped question number two. “When I was eleven, I wished for world peace, and I got a new ribbon instead. What’s the deal with that?”

“…Do you want the short answer, or the correct one?”

“Both!”

“Short answer: World peace isn’t something I can fit in my sack,” Aru said, her ears drooping. “Long answer… Well, to get world peace, I would have to brainwash a whole bunch of people. Sometimes, people fight for legitimate reasons, like trying to change the situation they’re in, and it would be evil to make them just stop fighting and accept having a bad life.”

QP tilted her head. There were various things she expected Santa to be able to give her, but a lecture on ethics hadn’t been one of them.

“Third question!” she interrupted, erasing the previous third question from her mind. “If you were Santa, all this time… Why didn’t you tell me?”

Aru didn’t say anything, but slowly walked out from behind the counter and sat down heavily in one of the little reading chairs set out for the patrons of the shop. All of a sudden her face looked gaunt and haggard, like years of exhaustion had settled on her shoulders at once.

“I wanted to. I really, really wanted to. QP… hmmm,” Aru said before halting, exhaling through her nose. “I… _love_ being Santa. I _love_ knowing that what I do is to spread joy to all the kids who’ve earned it, and to gently push the ones who haven’t into becoming better people. I _love_ knowing that for one night a year, I create so many happy, smiling faces. So many memories. I _love…_ being loved, by all the children of the land, even though they don’t know, and won’t see me. It’s so, so important to me.”

She leaned forward, her elbows on the arms of the chair, and rest her chin on her tented fingers. “But, QP, I _hate_ keeping secrets from my friends. Because eventually, you end up with a whole lot of secrets, and not a lot of friends. There are a few people who know I’m Santa, but they found out without me telling them. I wanted to tell you, myself, of my own free will. When the time was right. When you were an adult, and, and you weren’t on my list, and… I screwed it up.”

QP had never heard the sound of defeat before, but she knew it now from Aru’s voice. It was somehow humbling to see her, usually so cheerful and capable, slumped in a chair with her shoulders sagging – as if a weight had been dropped on them, a weight that had been years in coming and only just arrived.

“And then, I thought, well, if you worked it out by yourself,” the bunny carried on, “it wouldn’t be my fault. But then I just came out and told you, and I didn’t mean to, so it’s not something I did by myself and you didn’t work it out, and it’s all gone wrong.”

QP’s ears twitched. They always twitched when she felt the point of the conversation whoosh overhead. In her heart of hearts, she wasn’t even sure why Aru _needed_ to keep being Santa a secret. It was definitely the kind of thing you would want to put on your CV, wasn’t it? ‘Has seen the world, extremely hard working, eager to please, good judge of character. Provides own air miles, never misses a day of work, good sense of direction.’ Any way you sliced it, being Santa was like having a font of coolness that never ran out.

But, on some level, Aru was a rabbit. QP understood the hearts of rabbits, and understood that now was not the time to ask questions like that. Now was the time to work some QP-brand magic, cheer up her friend and eat some pudding. (All of QP’s plans involved the eating of pudding – sometimes more than once).

“Hey, hey. Aru. You told me a secret, so I’m going to tell you a secret, okay?” QP said, bending down so she was at face level. “It’s a super awesome one. You’re gonna be so surprised!”

The bunny looked up at her with eyes that were at once weepy and weary, but nodded her head anyway. Her chin was trembling very slightly.

“Ah! But you were gonna try and make me figure yours out, so I’m gonna make you figure mine out,” QP carried on, waggling her finger. “Here’s your hint. What was the nicest thing I did last year?”

Once again, the knowledge sprang to the tip of Aru’s tongue, but even as she began to frame the words she found herself disbelieving them. “You… saved pudding? By beating up a _god_?”

QP’s reaction was to twirl. QP enjoyed twirling and found that it was almost always appropriate, and occasionally broke up pity parties by twirling through through them like a landbound tornado. Only she wasn’t landbound at all, so the joke was entirely on them.

“Hahaha! Yes! I, QP, saved pudding! Not just _a_ pudding, but _all_ pudding. There’s no obstacle that my love for pudding cannot pierce! Also, space is nice. We should go to space sometime.”

Aru no longer felt sad. She didn’t even feel shocked. She just felt very, very confused. The world had become a very strange place in the last thirty seconds, and QP insisted on making it incrementally stranger.

“But! I couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t taught me all those Rbit formations. So in a way, you also helped to save pudding! I did all the work, but still!” the dog grinned, her chest thrust out pridefully. “That isn’t the secret, though. I mean, it is a secret, but I had to beat a bunch of people up, and they know about it, so it’s not really a ‘secret’ secret.”

“What _is_ the secret, then?”

“Well… uh… When, I, y’know, beat up the god lady that was mad at pudding, she sort’ve… employed me? I guess?” she said, scratching her nose a little. “My job is to make sure that conflicts over pudding don’t destroy the world. I’m like a pudding elemental!”

Aru’s jaw had fallen open, and was in no hurry to start resisting the siren song on gravity any time soon. A twitch was developing in her right eye, and one of her ears had flopped over her face. “You’re a _god?!_ ”

“I mean… I-I guess so? One of the Six Gods of Sweets. I’m just a trainee, though. But forget about that!” the dog carried on, as if forgetting that somebody was a god were an easy thing to do. “My real point is: when you look at it, isn’t Santa a public servant?”

Aru sat, bewildered, waiting for QP’s train of logic to pull in at the station and discover that it was one wheel short of a full axle.

“I mean, Santa serves the public by giving them Christmas, right? And I serve the public by making sure pudding isn’t responsible for the deaths of millions of people! So really, it’s fine that I know you’re Santa, because we just work in two different branches of the same company!” QP beamed.

“I… don’t think public servants work that way.”

“Shhh…” QP said, and hugged Aru’s head against her chest. “This is a message from god, Aru. _A_ god, admittedly, but still.”

There were a lot of things going through Aru’s head, and one of them was that Syura would kill to be in this position – although, to be fair, there were probably a lot of positions Syura would kill to be in with QP. The second was that, as cute as QP’s take on things was, it didn’t really change anything.

“Y-You know I can’t give you presents anymore, right? Santa has to be impartial. If you know that I’m Santa, how am I supposed to give you a lump of coal when you’re naughty?” Aru moaned.

QP, as was her habit, tried her very best to look like a perfect angelic puppy who would never require a single lump of coal and was, in fact, incapable of sin. Well, okay, there were some sins she would be loathe to give up. Gluttony, for example. It wasn’t her fault that she had a huge black hole situated in her lower intestine and that only one, delicious substance was amazing enough to fill it. People also told her that pride was a bit of an issue, although she begged to differ; all she did was acknowledge the very true fact that she was beautiful and amazing and huggable, although she was perhaps a little more aggressive than necessary about her acknowledgements. There was, also, the small issue of how many people she routinely beat up for reasons that were flimsy but well-intentioned.

“It’ll be fine. I don’t need a present from Santa.”

“Are you sure?” Aru asked, one eyebrow raised. “You’re grimacing.”

“I’m not! I’m smiling violently!” QP said, through teeth clenched as tight as a metalworker’s vice.

QP was also, much to Aru’s distress, squeezing violently. When is a hug not a hug? When the hug is too snug to be withstood. With only a little reluctance, Aru extracted her head from QP’s arms, for fear of losing it entirely.

“A-anyway! I don’t need a present from Santa. All I want is a present from Aru,” the dog continued, stroking Aru’s hair. Aru was fairly sure that usually the dog was the one who received the petting and not the other way around, but it seemed to satisfy her on some deep level, so it was fine.

“And, and, you gotta come to my party. You skipped the Christmas party, but that was the Christmas party. Now that we’re _colleagues_ , I can have an office party!”

“With pudding?” Aru asked, rolling her eyes.

It was the kind of question that didn’t really require an answer, but it got one anyway. A simple yes or no was too bland when it came to pudding; QP felt that the occasion required something more along the lines of shouting and running around the room with her arms spread like an aeroplane. Her enthusiasm was, like love and many other diseases, infectious. Before long, Aru found a smile spreading across her face. When QP finally stopped her pudding anticipation celebration proclamation, the smile had spread to her too.

“Hey, Aru?” she asked, breathing in tired little puffs. She resisted the urge to let her tongue loll out; she could only indulge her puppy nature so much. “I’m sorry for being mad without knowing all the details.”

“It’s fine,” Aru said, and meant it. She had woken up that day expecting to lose either her friend, or her job; to have kept both of them was a stroke of good fortune that she was determined not to take for granted. “I was keeping a secret from you, and I’m sorry.”

The two smiled at each other. The crisp sunshine of a cloudless winter day was filtering in through the windows of the shop, illuminating the swirling motes of dust in the air, and there was a great sense of peace that Aru knew would never last.

“So, uh. What did Syura get from Santa this year?”

Aru thought for a second, before deciding that ‘candid photographs’ should definitely not be part of her answer. It was, of course, a little naughty of her to lie.

But being Santa did come with privileges.


	10. Eye Test

“I think I need glasses,” Syura said, apropos of nothing – which, by and large, was the way that Syura preferred to operate. She had been poking experimentally at her school lunch for three minutes, in the vague hope that her fork would dissolve and she wouldn’t have to eat it. It included several things, most exotic and of shadowy origins, but notably a heaping serving of tapioca pudding. QP was against tapioca pudding because it had appropriated the name of pudding from the One True Pudding that she idolised, and was considering running a political campaign to have it banished from the cafeteria. She had also learned, to her great horror, that in some parts of the world there were people who call an entire _meal_ pudding, but then the meal itself might contain no actual pudding at all. She had sworn a solemn oath that one day, she would end it – and probably them, too.

QP blinked, before realising that demonstrating the correct use of her eyes might be offensive to the vision impaired, and stopped. Then she wondered if Syura could even see her blinking, and deciding that the answer was no, took up blinking again after a ten seconds of agonising, itchy eyeballs.

“But shopping for them is such a pain. They always want you to do an eye-test,” Syura continued, with a tiny shrug of her tiny shoulders. She preferred to call herself petite, partially because it implied she had any say in the matter at all, and partially because the words ‘skinny’ and ‘hikki’ went together much too well for her particular liking.

QP decided to showcase the depths of her sympathy by yawning, loudly. She’d had a late night last night. Ordinarily she kept a pretty early bedtime, but only because every time she saw the moon, she felt obliged to bark at it until it went away again. “Can’t blame you. I do enough tests at school.”

Syura’s eyes twinkled merrily, a sure sign of playful arguments to follow. “You _fail_ enough tests at school, you mean.”

“I don’t fail! I just answer laterally.”

“I mean, I get it, QP, but maybe try answering correctly instead?”

QP sniffed. It was an impressive sniff, from a girl who knew all there was to know about sniffing. Being a dog had its upsides. “Well, _I’m_ not the one flunking home economics.”

Syura, the rumour held, had been touched by a witch in a former life. There could be no other explanation for how every pot she used ended up full of bubbling green goop. The teacher, who was exactly as broad as she was tall, had given up all hope and begun allowing her to bring in cup ramen, then grading her on that instead. It meant less cookware with holes mysteriously eaten through the bottom.

“Excuse me, QP, but I am a gamer, and we have a very strong cultural identity. Cooking isn’t part of that identity, so I refuse to do it,” she said, puffing out her chest.

“So,” QP replied, in her slowest and most patient voice, “what you’re saying is that you’ve decided to perpetuate a negative stereotype?”

Syura’s ahoge flopped as she realised the implications. “...urk…”

“That’s probably the reason you need glasses, too. Your eyes have gone square from looking at a screen all day. In fact, I’m surprised your eyes aren’t cubes by now!” QP said, and then actually imagined the problems of having eyeballs with sharp edges. Suddenly, she felt a lot less like eating lunch.

“Actually, the reason I need glasses is–”

“It’s because you’re a nerd, right?” QP cut her off. “Actually, now that I think about it, a whole bunch of people I know wear glasses. Mr Arthur, that bullying cat, that weird pervert who thinks I’m a guy… and that’s not even counting Krila, who lost her eye in that tragic accident.”

“Uh… Hate to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure Krila’s eyes are both present and functional.”

“That’s crazy. Why would Krila, of all people, lie?” QP’s tail wagged fiercely as she said it. She was, if nothing else, very protective of her friends. Syura was, if nothing else, very appreciative of the fact that QP’s tail wagging provided a lovely little updraught right around the skirt area – never quite enough to show the details, but always just enough to make her mouth water.

“Hmm… Oh. Oh, _noooooo._ Syura, what if it’s my fault?!” QP carried on, ignoring the fact that Syura had chosen to drool rather than answer. “What if my elegant bullet patterns are so beautiful that they’re actually harming people’s vision?”

It took almost five seconds for Syura to snap back to reality from an enjoyable daydream, and QP had been shaking her for three of them. Eventually, when she got sick of hearing her own brain bounce around into her skull, she considered the question. “QP, uh… Not to say that your bullets aren’t pretty in their own way, but elegant…? I mean, you don’t even really make patterns. You just sorta vomit firepower and move around a lot until you win.”

“Yeah, and? It’s the simplest, easiest solution. That makes it elegant,” QP said, in a voice that made it clear that any questioning of this dogma would be met in violence. Syura’s first instinct, of course, was to question it, but upon further reflection she decided that such distractions were best pursued in more private, intimate arenas than the school cafeteria. Doing it in public was just gaudy. Instead, she made a big show of nodding appreciatively and murmuring.

“Anyway, we should totally go out and have fun before you go blind! There’s so many things you have yet to see, and we gotta tick them all off before your eyes become cubes!”

Syura was about to tell QP that she’d gotten the wrong end of the stick, before she remembered how serious QP was about stick retrieval. They’d once tried to play pooh-sticks in the forest, which mostly consisted of Syura dropping a stick into the river and then giggling when QP inevitably dove in to collect it. They had been young, then. Simple times, for simple children.

Back in the present, QP had grabbed Syura’s hand and was making every attempt to drag her out of the cafeteria. This was not, incidentally, the playful frolicking kind of hand-holding that Syura would have preferred. It was a little like having your hand bitten by a pitbull – your hand is going with the dog, regardless of whether the rest of your body does.

“QP, wait. I’m not so sure we should skip class just so we can have a date.”

“It’s _not_ a date. Dates grow on trees,” the dog retorted, but she stopped her tugging nonetheless. The net result of this was that they were now holding hands awkwardly in the middle of the lunch room. Somebody began clapping. “Fine, we’ll do class. But after school, we’re gonna get you some glasses, and then we’re gonna have a ton of fun! No excuses!”

With that, the dog girl turned on her heel and marched off, leaving a trail of confused underclassmen in her wake. Nobody had the heart to tell her that she was heading in the opposite direction of her next class, or that she had left her lunch half-eaten on the table with fifteen minutes of break left.

“How aggressive,” Syura murmured to herself.

Eyewitness accounts were conflicted on whether she was swooning or not.

* * *

 

“So… Since you wanted to show me some things worth seeing, why don’t we go back to my house? I have some really cute outfits you could try on.”

“Syura, I am _not_ dressing up as a maid. It just isn’t happening.”

“Darn. Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

Her advances rebuffed, Syura took a long, luxurious draw of her milkshake. The last class of the day had been Geography, and nothing chased away her crippling terror of maps better than a glass of milk, sugar, ice cream, and crumbled up cookie pieces smashed together with a blender. This had always been her favourite milkshake shop, partially because it had a neat black and white checkerboard floor, but mostly because it had a barely functioning arcade cabinet tucked away in the corner. Old arcade cabinets were the best, she had decided, because they were made in a time when a quarter bought quite a bit more than it did today, and the makers were protective enough of their machines not to include a way to update the pricing.

“I don’t get what your fascination with the whole maid thing is, anyway,” QP grumbled, stirring her shake with a straw. Her movements were relaxed and languid; her last class had been PE, which always served to help her burn off excess energy, unless it lit her competitive spirit, in which case she became a bouncing, incandescent ball of puppyish vigour. At that moment, her only desire was to inhale enough sugar to recover from the day’s exertions and ascend to her true form as a god of shouting.

Syura put her hand on the table and drummed her fingers as she put her thoughts in order. She had active hands. That was the trouble, when you spent some much time pushing keys or buttons: so much dexterity, and so little use for it. She played with her forks, her pens, her clothes. Sometimes she would take down some of her cosplay outfits from the rack and just run her fingers along the fabric – so different to what she wore normally.

“It’s because you’d look good as one,” she said, finally. QP frowned, but didn’t retort; beginning with a compliment had bought her a little time. “You always dress in really cute clothes, but you never wear anything elegant. I want to see that, a little.”

QP’s face assumed the frown of a girl who was, absolutely, not buying it. “You just want me to call you ‘master’, don’t you?”

“Oh, no! No no no no no no _no_ ,” Syura said, then whipped out her phone and started pressing buttons. “Oh, but could you say that again, please? Maybe a little louder, and into the mouthpiece?”

The dog sighed, which was unusual. For QP to sigh about a problem, it had to be something she couldn’t spring up and douse with bullets, or otherwise tackle with an outpouring of spirited yapping. “You seem to be having a bunch of fun. Even thought I spent the whole day worrying about you.”

Syura scratched her head. “...Didn’t you spend the whole day eating and playing, though?”

“Yeah, because I was so worried I had to take my mind off it!” QP said, slamming her palms on the table and leaning over so as to more easily shout in Syura’s face. Her tail swished furiously behind her. “What are you gonna do if you go blind, Syura? How can you code if you can’t even see the keyboard? It’s impossible!”

Syura tried her best to smile. She knew from long experience that when QP shouted, the worst thing to do was shout back, because she was probably better at it. “You know I can touch type, right? Just because I’m friends with chickens doesn’t mean I’m a hen-pecker like you.”

“...urp…” QP replied, and sat back down.

“Besides, you think a little thing like that would stop me from following my dreams? Ha! _I_ am a bona fide, dyed-in-the-wool game ninja! Who was the one who beat all those arcade games on one credit? Me! Who achieves one hundred percent completion on every game she buys? Me!”

“Who failed her first programming assignment because she’d been up for 48 hours grinding MMOs?”

“M – Shut up! Anyway, my point is that I like being challenged. It’s why I hang out with you. It’s tough to find somebody as cute and passionate as me, and you’re the closest thing available,” Syura said, in what she intended to be a touching sentiment.

“Thanks. I think?”

“...also-my-eyes-are-totally-fine-you-just-got-the-wrong-idea,” Syura said in one breath. For a moment, she thought she had gotten away with it. Then QP’s eye twitched.

“Pardon?”

“You’re pardoned.”

QP’s eye was still twitching. “No. I meant, say that again.”

“Maybe, but you have to call me ‘master’ first.”

QP’s tail was smacking against the back of her chair. “Say. It. Again.”

“Well, I mean… All I said was that I needed glasses, right? And when I tried to tell you _why_ I needed them, you cut me off. I can see just fine, but there’s a convention next month and I’m–”

“...You’re cosplaying,” QP finished, flatly. “I was super turbo worried about your dreams and future and ambitions and stuff, and you were thinking about cosplaying!”

Syura suddenly became aware that she had half of her milkshake left, and decided it would be a fine idea to drink it as quickly as possible. Purely because she enjoyed milkshake, of course, and not because she believed there was an outside chance that it was going to get dumped in her lap. It certainly wasn’t an excuse to avoid looking QP in the eye. It was a shame she couldn’t, but everybody knows you have to maintain unrelenting eye contact with a milkshake when you drink it. It’s just not polite otherwise. When she had finally run out of milkshake and was forced to look up, she found QP’s withering gaze had not left her.

“Look, okay. I get it. I really appreciate that you were thinking about me and stuff, and next time you cut me off in the middle of saying something I should totally tell you to shut up so I can explain. I’ll make it up to you. Why don’t we go back to my house, play some videogames, and you can help yourself to myspecial after-game snack supplies?”

QP crossed her arms, and considered the offer carefully. “And you have pudding? You won’t make me dress up as a maid?”

Somewhere in her mind’s eye, Syura saw the glimmer of opportunity. “I do have pudding. And you know what? _I’ll_ dress up as the maid, and you can be the master, and I’ll serve you some pudding like a real maid would. I won’t even have any myself. How does that sound?”

For a moment, QP was silent; the habitual, easy smile that came to her face when she heard the word ‘pudding’ failed to appear. “No. You have to have at least one cup. Pudding’s super great when you eat it by yourself, but it’s better when you share it with friends. Pudding should bring people together.”

And then QP was back to her old, happy self, cheerfully extolling the virtues of the thing she loved most, in the loudest voice she had. She was a pudding elemental, an evangelical preacher of desserts. And, quite importantly, she had just tacitly agreed to dress up as the master of the house. It wouldn’t quite be the short skirt and maid outfit of Syura’s dreams – but a fine tie, a man’s shirt and some very snug trousers? Oh, she could work with that. She downed the last dregs of her milkshake, and reminded herself to buy a pair of cheap reading glasses tomorrow.

But for today, she already had plenty that was worth seeing.|


	11. Pudding for Two

QP was a girl of many talents, and one of them was that she could smash ‘pudding’ into any other word to create a new and bizarre entity. She was Captain Picard at the bridge of the Enterprise, shouting ‘make it so!’; according to her whims, the world now knew the wonder of being pudding-shy, of taking pudding baths, and of course, the majesty of the puddingphone, which was much like a phone of the xylo variety but with a pleasing wobble applied to all the notes.

She earnestly believed that the reason all these ideas flourished organically into things that existed was that adding pudding to any given idea automagically made it better. Aru, on the other hand, thought it was likely up to the fact that she was a magical pudding god with a history of beating up whatever obstacles life placed in her path; the laws of reality had obviously been taking notes, and were just submitting to save themselves the manhandling.

The newest chimaera brought into the world had been the Pudding Parlour, a business that existed only to purvey the most prestigious puddings to the purile palates of the proletariat. As a hard-nosed business bunny, Aru had been almost certain that not enough people shared QP’s pudding fetish to support a wholly pudding based diner, but they thrived as if to spite her; perhaps, she thought, QP’s control of all pudding-related laws of reality also extended to the laws of pudding economics.

“So? What are you going to order?” QP asked, peering over the top of her menu.

There was an obvious answer as to what you order in a restaurant that serves exclusively pudding, but Aru chose not to say it. In all honesty, she was trying to find her tongue. Something was off in the way that QP was acting. There were no grass stains on her skirt, for one. QP attracted grass stains like lightbulbs attract moths; Aru had often theorised that QP’s education must consist entirely of rolling down the grass verge leading up to the school, over and over and over again; this was not so very far from the truth, although there was also a certain amount of hole-digging on the dog-girl’s ideal curriculum.

She also smelled very strongly of perfume, which was not within her normal olfactory repertoire. On good days, she smelled like caramel and vanilla; on a bad day she smelled, well, exactly as you would expect from a girl who insisted on running everywhere at full speed, regardless of how hot it was. _Every_ day she smelled of wet dog for hours after she’d had her morning shower. But never of perfume.

Her hair had been brushed, her ears were immaculately fluffy, and her tail, ever-wagging, had been groomed to perfection. It all struck Aru as being ominously over-the-top for going to lunch with a friend. Maybe she was imagining it. Or maybe fate had just decided that her friend was going to look fantastic, like how sometimes your toast wasn’t that good and then sometimes it was just a sublime harmony of bread and butter substitute. Maybe QP was just a particularly well turned-out slice of toast today. Or perhaps – and this was the third, tantalising possibility that made Aru’s little cotton-tail quiver just thinking about it – QP was trying to impress her.

“Aruuuu! I know picking the right pudding is super important, and there’s a whole bunch of options, but don’t ignore me, okay? Here, I’ll help you pick.”

There were not, in fact, a whole bunch of options. The menu was just pudding listed thirteen times in thirteen different languages, with cute little blurbs implying but never quite stating that _this_ pudding had a particular quality that somehow set it apart from the others. But before she could relay this salient point, QP had already dragged her chair to Aru’s side of the table and smooshed herself in next to her.

“I like _this_ one, because it has a simple but refined flavour and a perfect puddingy texture. But this one, down here, this one’s also good because it has a really exotic wobble. This one I _don’t_ like, because it just tries too hard, you know? Pudding shouldn’t need to try hard. Pudding should just be effortlessly perfect.”

If Aru had had a magic marker upon her person, she would have taken it out, apologised profusely in advance, and written the words ‘placebo effect’ on QP’s forehead. But every time she touched a magic marker she became drunk on the sheer power of it. Once Arthur had bought her a can of spray paint, ostensibly so they could make a sign for the shop, and she had spent the rest of the day daubing ‘YOU ARE A WONDERFUL PERSON’ and ‘PLEASE HAVE A NICE DAY’ on various walls around the city. If she were given the opportunity to write on QP, well… The temptation to put ‘Property of Aru’ somewhere nice and noticeable might be too much.

“I’ll, um… Let you pick for me. You _are_ the expert, after all,” she said at last, pretending to be absorbed in the menu.

A waiter was summoned, and QP ordered two puddings with pronunciations so enthusiastically mangled that they might as well have been a totally new genus of cuisine. She seemed more than happy to step into the role of pudding gastronomer, and pleased at being deferred to; there was a distinct ‘thump’ from her wagging tail smacking against the back of the chairs. As the waiter retreated to the safety of the counter, she turned to Aru and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Um, actually, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

There were certain things in the world that just ought to be. Christmas ought to be happy, a tower ought to be tall, and QP ought to be loud, so she could stand atop the tower and evangelise about pudding for all to hear. Her whispering was like a foreign concept, and one that struck fear into a bunny like Aru. (She was, as she liked to maintain, quite brave for a bunny, but they were on the whole inclined to nervousness, which helped with the not-being-eaten agenda that bunny rabbits seemed to have).

As if sensing Aru’s nervousness, QP lowered her voice even further. “I just wanna say beforehand that you don’t have to decide right now, and I won’t be offended even if you say no, alright?”

Being Santa was not an especially warm job. Snow was plentiful, and the ice treacherous; between them, Aru had quickly become a begrudging expert on cleated boots and thermal underwear, neither of which were exactly for the fashion-conscious. Despite all that, she had never frozen quite so thoroughly as she did now.

The perfume, the grooming, the dancing-around-the-topic finger twiddling that was so unlike her: it all added up. QP, the Bermuda Triangle of romantic relations, the girl with a head as thick as a dreadnought’s hull, had finally awoken from her slumber and was about to launch her first-ever assault on somebody else’s heart.

As she reeled in shock, the question fluttered dully through Aru’s brain: _why?_ The _me_ was only implied after the fact, although she had some confidence in her long legs, well-kept hair and approachable personality. But why _now_ , of all times? Certainly, they had been having lunch together a lot more often, but that said more about QP’s love of food than her love of rabbits. She personally hadn’t made any romantic overtures, because the only overture the dog-girl was interested in had 1812 in the name and gave her an excuse to fire wildly as an accompaniment.

Perhaps, she thought, it was all down to her special talent. Although QP’s love for pudding remained her primary attribute in the hearts of the masses, she had another, more subtle talent: an innate understanding of the hearts of rabbits. It usually didn’t work on Aru, since she was a girl and a Santa as well as a bunny, but what if it had? It was true that she, hellbent on keeping her yuletide profession secret and walled up in a shop that had only one regular customer, was lonesome among bunnies. Maybe that had gone through to QP on some subconscious level.

After all, it wasn’t like she wasn’t… well, _interested_. QP was such a bright, peppy girl, apt to charge in when Aru tended to fall back. She seemed to defy gravity with her spirit, and there was something very beautiful, very loveable, in that. But it was different to how she had imagined it going. Not to say that she sometimes just laid in bed and daydreamed about it, of course. That would be silly. She had just always thought that she’d made the first move. She’d never considered the idea that she would be _chased_. But it stood to reason, didn’t it? QP was a dog, and what did dogs do when they saw something they wanted?

She swallowed back the lump in her throat, steadied her shaking hands. Her friend – her potentially more than friend – needed some kind of answer. “Y… Yes. What did you want to ask?”

There was the faintest of blushes on QP’s cheeks. The very smallest hint of dew on her eyelashes. “Um, so… I was thinking that… well, maybe… Next Christmas, I could help you out with the deliveries? Pretty please? I want to be a Rudolph!”

Aru felt a huge weight fall from her shoulders, and was incredibly disappointed that it had. “A… you… ah. You mean you want to be a _reindeer_?”

“No, I wanna be a Rudolph! I wanna go at the very front of the sleigh and have a glow in the dark nose! You know how useful that would be? I’m _always_ stubbing my toe when I get up for my midnight pudding snack!” QP hissed, still in her stage whisper.

“Mm… Maybe try flying instead of walking, then?” Aru sighed. “I can’t give you a glow in the dark nose, QP. I’m sorry. It’s not within my power.”

“Not even if I put it on my list to Santa?”

“You don’t get presents from Santa anymore. It’s a conflict of interests. If you _really_ want, you can help me with the delivery. I don’t have a sleigh, though. I don’t even have jingle bells.”

“You don’t?” the dog-girl asked, with the pleading eyes of a disappointed child. “Aww… Well, if Batman smells, I’ll let you know. Even if my nose doesn’t glow, it’s the best at sniffing!”

“Right. Your nose is more than cute enough as it is,” she replied, and gave said nose a little boop.

QP’s ears flopped down. “…Aru? Are you mad? You seem mad.”

“I just had a heart attack. Nothing big.”

That, of course, was a lie. She’d raked through all her thoughts and her feelings, and god help her, she’d done it in the middle of a parlour selling nothing but pudding. And it all turned out to be a big, fat, false alarm. She felt exhausted, relieved, extremely disappointed. But not angry. Never angry.

Although she _did_ have a heart attack when she saw the size of the bill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally a gift for Yoshister/Dino.


	12. Sole Purpose

There were a number of qualifications you needed to have before you could hold the illustrious title of Santa.

Firstly, you had to be a cute anime girl. That went almost without saying, but it also cut down the number of people eligible for the position by half or more, depending on how mercilessly you enforced the ‘cute’ part. (Aru, safe in the knowledge that her cuteness was sufficient, maintained that the benchmark for cuteness was very high indeed.)

Secondly, you had to have some aptitude for the numerous required secondary skills a Santa needed to possess. Yes, the List would take care of the whole partial omniscience thing for you, so you could tell when people were sleeping, and when they were awake, and what their various sins were, and why most of those sins would make exceedingly juicy blackmail material if you somehow became Not Santa again. But it wasn’t going to teach you basic breaking and entry, or how to approach a reindeer without being kicked in the stomach. Those were beneath the purview of the List.

Thirdly, you had to have big feet. This was the factor that many cute anime girls who were skilled in the practices of larceny and animal husbandry lacked: the majority of them had teeny tiny feet, all the better for making them look vulnerable and adorable when they took their shoes off. But that wouldn’t do, for Santa. Santa needed the feet of a polar bear or a snowshoe hare. Santa needed to spread his weight across the slippery ice and snow to help his balance and to leave convincingly large bootprints on people’s rooftops.

There were a few other requirements, like a strong back and the ability to run around all night without having much to eat and drink, so it followed that the platonic ideal of Santa was a cute anime girl, cross-bred with a dromedary camel. But in the absence of that, Aru had feet big enough to fill Santa’s very demanding boots.

That, among other reasons, was why she hated shoe shopping with a passion that could send shivers down the very bones of the Earth. It just wasn’t _fair_. Her feet only ever felt comfortable in men’s shoes, but men’s shoes had so little variety. There were only two colours, and they were black and brown. Black and brown! Where were the blue shoes of the suede variety, the loafers in effervescent pink? Where were the kicks with the rainbows on the front and the rollerskates in the heel? Did guys just not like fun? Who didn’t like fun?

On top of that, there were only two real shapes to pick from – you either got a boot, or you got a tiny faux-leather boat with laces on it. They were such safe options, and Aru thought it was a little sad. Did nobody in the male population have the boldness to rock a peep-toe? Was the Mary-Jane a step too far? Where were the slingbacks of yesteryear?

There were advantages to being a guy when it came to clothes, she supposed. They had pockets _everywhere_. She would have sold her soul to find a nice dress with more than a single pocket on it, but clothes for men were replete with them. Spare patch of fabric on that shirt? Slap a pocket on it. Annoyed at the fact that you can’t hold things with your knees or your elbows? Slap a pocket on them. What’s that? The entire inside of your jacket isn’t doing anything? Sounds like you need a couple of pockets on that, friend. Men seemed to have more pockets than they had clothes, and as a girl who carted around enough presents for all the world’s children, she wanted that lifestyle.

She was still musing over some moccasins when she heard three very loud and familiar voices enter the store. Her first instinct was to drop to the floor and roll under a shoe rack. Yes, it looked weird, and yes, she felt bad about exploiting her natural stealth capacities as Solid Santa, but –

“C’mon, QP. I know you were looking for a snack, but did you have to bring us to a shoe shop? Pick somewhere where the rest of us can eat something, too.”

“Syura… You know I can _end you_ , right? That that’s just a thing I can do?”

“You cannot end Syura, the Lord of Malfeasance. Her dark power has grown too strong. She will be waiting at the end of time, where all things collide… ufufu.”

“Krila! Don’t take her side!”

“Little did you know, QP, that Krila is my underling for the day. I gave her my croissant and she gave me her soul!”

“But, Krila! What about your fealty to the beast gods?”

“Only a fool would expect loyalty from a member of Waruda.”

“…I meant to ask about that. What do you even _do_ for Waruda, anyway?”

“…Covert surveillance operations. My purpose is to insinuate myself into the beast god’s group, discover her plans for anti-Waruda magic or operations, and then report back to the Dark Beast Pierrot. In return, they offer me a tribute of bread filled with the blood of red beans.”

“We never plan anything, though.”

“I know. It’s great. Ufufu.”

Aru had, momentarily, stopped breathing. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see them. They were her friends, for a given definition of ‘friends’. She just didn’t want them to see her when she was staring down the barrel of a size twelve. So far, nobody seemed to have noticed the fact that her feet were of a size most prodigious, and she was loathe to draw attention to the fact. As useful as they were for being Santa, they weren’t… Well, she didn’t think they were the most feminine or attractive feature to have. Not the kind of thing she wanted to broadcast, or talk about, or really think about until the moments in which they came in useful.

The only solution was to sneak out of the store without QP and company noticing her. For once, she was glad that Syura existed, because Syura would keep the other two distracted with her nonsense, trash talk and off-colour flirting. Krila was also functionally blind in one eye and also wildly off her rocker, so she wasn’t too much of a concern. The real problem – as always – was QP. For now, she was hiding in an aromatic maze of faux-leather and disinfectant spray. But that wouldn’t fool QP’s nose forever. It couldn’t. Sooner or later she would stumble across the telltale, hopefully delightful scent of Aru and grow suspicious. It was a matter of time.

Inching herself forward with her elbows and forearms like a true sneaking professional, she began to simulate an exit plan. They were heading to the back of the store, to look at all the novelty shoes. She couldn’t really get behind the idea of novelty shoes. They looked like tiny turtles that had been caught in a shower of hot glue and rhinestones. But that gave her a chance to make it to the end of her shoe rack closest to the entrance. From there, she could duck behind the rotating carousel of belts – why were they selling belts in a shoe store? – execute an unnecessary combat roll to the tills area, buy a stick of chewing gum (again, why did they sell chewing gum?) and then escape with her dignity mostly intact.

Then she began to simulate problems with her exit plan. Like what would happen if one of the shop clerks saw her sneaking around under the shoe rack. Obviously, her first reaction would be to say she had dropped her contact lenses, which didn’t exist, and was looking for them. But that would almost undoubtedly result in the clerk stopping to help her, and then she’d be stuck in the shop until QP and company noticed her and came over, and QP would look at her with those good doggy kind of eyes and say, “Aru, what are you doing here”, and she’d give her the excuse and she’d say: “Wow, I didn’t know you had contact lenses!” And then the shop clerk would get suspicious and pull out his double-barrelled shotgun, which as a member of the retail industry she was sure fifty percent of all shop clerks carried with them at all times, and then she would have to flee and everybody would notice her huge feet and it would be awful.

What if she got to the bit where she had to do an unnecessary combat roll and then, mid-roll, somebody mistook her for a ten pound bowling ball, picked her up, took her to the nearest bowling alley and bowled a strike with her? She weighed an awful lot more than ten pounds, so when she hit the pins she would almost certainly knock them all over. In fact, she would make a spectacular bowling ball, up until the point where the arm came down and tried to put her through the machine that spat the bowling balls back out, at which point she would be in exceptional pain. But for that one bowl, that one strike, she would be like a baseball bat made from a tree felled with a lightning bolt: unstoppable, and ultra rare.

She shook her head. Trains of thoughts like these were why she had to have coffee in the morning. She hadn’t had coffee this morning, because she had been mentally fortifying herself for the ordeal of buying shoes. She was a caffeine deprived lapin, and that was almost as bad as being on medical-grade hallucinogenics.

It was at that point that QP, seeing Aru’s feet sticking out from the end of a shoe rack, seized them and pulled hard.

“Aha! See, I told you it was Aru! I would recognise those legs anywhere!” she boasted as she hauled the struggling bunny out from her shoe-laden sanctuary.

“I knew you were the kind of girl that’s obsessed with legs. I bet that’s why you don’t like any of my shmup protagonist designs, right?! All this time I thought you had a good reason, but you just don’t like the lack of thighs!” Syura grumbled.

“I don’t like your shmup protagonists because they look like a bunch of circles. They don’t even have necks!”

“I-it’s programmer art! Games are a multimedia package, so you can’t expect me to be good at every single skill they need, right?”

“Yeah, but then the personalities are a little weird, too. Your main character talks about mango ice cream all the time. What’s with that?”

“Eating is a universal human experience! Giving a character a signature favourite food is a cheap way to make them relatable!”

“Don’t take such obvious shortcuts! You can be better than this, Syura! Do your best!”

As enthralling as Aru found a conversation about character design to be, she had lived her entire life without having QP’s hands around her ankles and had grown to appreciate the freedom that it gave her. She began to struggle very, very gently, in the hopes that if she did it gently enough, QP wouldn’t notice when her grip slipped and she could then burrow back under the shoe rack to relatively safety. Unfortunately, she didn’t struggle quite gently enough.

“Oh. Oh! Hi, Aru! What are you doing here?” QP asked at last, giving Aru’s leg’s one more tug to bring her fully out into the open. She reached down a hand to pull her up, and, reluctantly, Aru took it.

“Oh, wow, QP. I just don’t know. What could she _possibly_ be doing in a shoe store?” Syura asked, and got an elbow to the ribs for her sarcasm.

“I kinda meant ‘what are you doing under the shoe rack’, but thanks for the input, Syura.”

Krila took a dramatic step forward, and held her hand in front of her mouth as she laughed. “Fufufu. It is as plain as day; only a child would not see the intentions of the pale-eared beast. She was holding communion with the furtive guardians of the shoe industry: the fell gnomes that lurk in the shadows of their wares. Truly, I did not think I would encounter another gnomish scholar in this unenlightened age.”

QP raised an eyebrow, and Syura followed suit. It might have been the first thing they agreed on that day. “Uh, _gnomes_?”

“All shoes are made by gnomes. Others may seek to obfuscate this divine truth, but I, Krila, emissary of the void, bear witness!”

QP’s ears flopped down. She was less than convinced. “…So, say I went home right now and made a pair of shoes. What then?”

“Then you would be a gnome.”

“But I’m not a gnome. I don’t even _want_ to be a gnome.”

“Then do not trespass upon their duties, or you will be swallowed up by their subterranean arts.”

That was the nice thing about having Krila around. It was almost impossible to focus too strongly on any one topic while she was hurling nonsense at you, so any uncomfortable questions just fell by the wayside as you tried to figure out what she was saying. It took her only one tangent to render the question of why Aru was slithering around under the shoe racks completely unanswerable, even to Aru herself.

“Well, whatever. I’m glad we met up with her here. The party feels empty without our barbarian rabbit maid,” Syura said, shrugging her tiny shoulders. “I hate shopping for shoes, so let’s just quickly grab some sneakers and then we can go out for ice cream.”

For once in her life, Aru’s heart resonated with Syura’s. Her heart was ready to quit shoe shopping forever, to submit herself to the great gacha of online buying for shoes you had never tried on and might be delivered in the wrong size anyway. Her body was ready for ice cream, because it was always ready for ice cream; there was a space deep within herself that she had carved out for ice cream, probably with a spoon. Actually, she was just deeply enthralled by desserts in general; tiramisu was a particular favourite, especially if it was brought out in a glass container to show off the lovely layers.

“Syura! We’re looking for running shoes, not sneakers. If you get the wrong kind, they can mess up your knees,” QP scolded.

“Who cares, right? I won’t need knees after I flunk PE. I just need a good chair with wheels on it. A _really_ good chair.”

“Don’t just casually write off PE like that!”

“Sorry, QP, but this is the cruel reality of the world. Nobody has the resources to do everything, so you have to prioritise. If you spend points in graphics, you have to take them out of level design. If you perk into programming, you can’t unlock the PE skill tree. I’m just saving resources that would go towards getting a bad grade in one subject, and putting them in a subject I have a chance of getting a fantastic grade for.”

Aru narrowed her eyes. “And just how many points did you put into making excuses for laziness? Just do your best, no matter what the subject is.”

“That’s fine for an Energizer Bunny like you, maybe. The rest of us have lives.”

Aru was saved from pointing out the irony of Syura saying somebody else had no life by Krila, who had ascertained that no shoe in the store was shadowy enough for her tastes and was now seeking entertainment. “I am sorry, Flame-Haired Cyber Ghost. There are some truths too horrible for even a Dark Apostle like myself to accept. A strong body is needed to contain the demonic energies.”

Syura gasped. She had been sure that Krila was her ally. In fact, she was also sure she had paid Krila the sum total of one (1) croissant to be her ally. It was a betrayal unlike any she had ever known, apart from the time she invited QP over for a sleepover and then QP ate her pudding while she was trying to sneakily touch her tail.

“Wouldn’t it be great to just skip PE, though? Don’t you get picked last for group sports every time?”

“Your perception has been clouded by the Illuminants, Syura,” Krila said, wiggling an eyebrow and breaking into what she hoped was an intimidating cackle. “Yesterday, I was chosen first to stride onto the field of battle.”

“It was hockey, and I was team captain!” QP added.

“Indeed. Our enemies tried to beat us down with their rods of holy power, but for once such as I, who has held her hand in the jaws of a lion, such crass violence is but an amusement.”

“They were really mean about it. They deliberately went after Krila because they thought she was the weak link, so… I stomped ’em,” QP continued, smiling sweetly. QP with no weapon was a formidable combatant; if you armed her with what amounted to a large club, that was upgraded to devastating. “Hey, hey, Aru. What sports do you like?”

Aru thought deeply, not because she didn’t know the answer, but because she wasn’t sure if it was an acceptable answer to give. Her favourite, if she was honest, was golf. You went to what amounted to a very large, beautiful place full of greenery and nature, you hauled around a set of clubs that were much lighter than a standard sack o’ presents™, and you generally had a very relaxing time. She wasn’t good at it, by any stretch of the imagination; her follow-through was not particularly good, and she had yet the master wiggling her fingers before a stroke like all the professionals seemed to do. But it was a nice day trip that didn’t involve hurriedly circumnavigating the globe, which was very much a plus.

“Well, it’s obvious, right?” Syura said, filling in the gap as Aru pondered her answer. “It’s gotta be basketball.”

“Oh yeah!” QP agreed, snapping her fingers. “You’d be perfect for basketball, since you have such huge feet.”

Aru’s blood ran cold. QP had noticed her enormous feet? To be fair they were big enough that it was hard _not_ to notice them, and she had hardly expected QP to go through her entire life without ever looking down at any point, but she had never said anything about it. Maybe she had just been hoping against hope that QP’s brain was too full of pudding to ever really comprehend that one of her best friends had feet the size of dinner plates.

“Huge feet? What does that have to do with basketball?” Syura asked.

“Big feet are more powerful, so she can jump higher.”

“That’s… not how that works. Besides, she can fly. Why would she ever jump when she can fly?”

“Alright, then! Big feet usually mean you have long legs, so you’re taller and better at basketball since you can reach the hoop easier!”

“She. Can. Fly.”

“She said ‘weh’,” Krila intoned dully. She was right, of course. Aru hadn’t realised it at the time, but she had certainly let out a long ‘weeeeeehhh!!!’ at some point in the very recent past.

“’Weh?’” QP echoed, tilting her head and rubbing her chin. “Oh, I get it! Aru’s embarrassed because we’re praising her!”

Syura raised both eyebrows. “Are we praising her, though…?”

“Of course! I wish I had big feet. I feel like I’m never going to get tall.”

“That’s because you’re never going to get tall. You’ll always be short and flat.”

“Ha! That’s what you think. The only thing flat about me is my tummy. But all the pudding I eat has to go _somewhere_ , and if it isn’t going to my tummy, then it must be going to my chest!” QP declared smugly.

“Oh?” Syura asked, unimpressed. “If you had to eat that much pudding to get that little bust, it makes me think that pudding isn’t the wonder food you think it is.”

It was at that point that QP rolled up her sleeve. “Don’t. Insult. Pudding.”

Aru watched all this happen distantly, having resigned herself to being known as the bunny with the big feet. But she was brought out of her shell-shocked reverie by Krila tugging insistently at her sleeve.

“Aru. I, the maiden of the apocalypse, do entreat you to prevent the coming war between the holy beast and the flame-haired maiden. I don’t want to be barred from another shoe store,” she said, and shivered.

Despite herself, Aru raised an eyebrow. “How did you get barred from the first one?”

“I asked them to produce the gnomes. They didn’t, which proved that they were gnome collaborationists.”

Aru sighed. In the end, it seemed that all her worrying about foot size was for nothing. QP seemed to think it was a positive thing, and Syura was off in her own bizarre rivalries and game logic to care. The real problem was that she kept letting herself get caught up in QP and Syura’s pace, which was not a pace any sane person should live at. And, for all that she had an ever-present, omniscient voice in the back of her head that kept her appraised of who deserved what at Christmas, Aru considered herself quite sane. As QP and Syura began to square up to one another, the rabbit smiled, and realised yet another useful facet of having large feet.

It made a bigger impact when you had to put your foot down.


	13. Lessons in Gifts and Deliverance

Despite not being old, male or possessed of a belly like a beach ball, Aru considered herself a very conservative Santa and followed all the various Santa rules, lest she be hit with some sort of Santa sanction. Even if her belly was full, she would never walk past a plate of cookies and milk that had been left out for her; she would eat just enough to show that she had been there, so there would be excitement and whimsy in the morning. If they left a carrot for the reindeer, she would see that the reindeer got it – even though she was quite partial to munching on a few carrots herself. Most importantly, she always wore red when she was on the job.

Nico was not a conservative Santa. In fact, Nico was not a Santa at all and had just been press-ganged into helping Aru deliver things, which she felt was very unfair. Even the postman, who was perhaps the closest thing to Santa that existed in civilian life, hadn’t tried that. (She had, up until quite recently, been engaged in a quiet civil war with the postal service. They kept insisting on delivering mail to her, which was very irritating when every piece of mail was a Christmas card from a long-lost auntie). As a result, she had a number of groundbreaking ideas on how the age-old profession might be made more modern, trendy and convenient for everybody involved, but mostly for her.

“I still don’t get what we have to go _inside_ the house. That’s super creepy. What if there’s dogs? What then?” she complained, pulling out a chair and sitting down at Aru’s kitchen table. “There’s this really cool new invention, you know. It’s called a mail box, and it’s designed to let people safely receive parcels.”

“That’s not the point, Nico,” Aru replied, patiently. “Leaving the presents under the tree is part of the magic of Christmas, and that’s what it’s really about. We’re not delivering parcels. We’re putting a smile on the face of every little girl and boy, and giving them an experience that goes mundane, everyday life.”

“Doesn’t it spoil the magic when little Timmy goes downstairs and finds out Santa gave him a colouring book instead of the yacht he asked for?”

Aru sighed. She needed many things right now, but a cup of coffee held pride of place in the top spot. She flicked on the kettle. “There’s such a thing as a yacht economy, okay? If we gave everybody yachts, yachts would be worth nothing and we’d put shipyards around the world out of business, and then Timmy’s parents would have to pay for a massive garage to put Timmy’s yacht in. Besides, do _you_ want to carry a yacht halfway across the world? You can if you like, but I don’t. So rule one of your list to Santa is no yachts.”

To Nico this sounded suspiciously like communism, but then she _was_ a member of the mercantile class via her parents. “Alright, but why do we have to wear red? Why can’t we wear camouflage or something?”

Aru pretended to think about this question as she weighed her coffee beans and put them into the grinder. She _had_ thought about it previously – many times, in fact. She had always come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t proper somehow. But she had also made up several other justifications in case that one wasn’t enough. “Firstly, camouflage doesn’t work the way you think it does. You can’t just wear black and then you blend in. Secondly, if you get caught, what do you want to look like – Santa, or a burglar?”

“Then what’s with this weird chimney business? Why can’t we just go in through the windows?”

“Because windows have locks.”

“Chimneys have fire! You can get around a lock with a brick, but–”

“You get around fire by throwing snow down the chimney, and it doesn’t cause hundreds in property damage per house you visit.”

Nico folded her arms and began to pout. She had deep, heavy bags under her eyes, and her shoulders ached in a way that she hadn’t thought she’d feel for another thirty years. Being Santa was _hard_. Why wouldn’t Aru let her make it easy?

“Oh, by the way. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

She shook her head. “I hate coffee. It’s too bitter. I don’t know how you adults drink it.” The word ‘adults’ came out like a slur.

“To be honest, I kind’ve hate it too. Good coffee is such a pain to make, you know?” Aru said, studiously not looking in Nico’s direction. “To start with, you need all these weird and wonderful devices – french presses, scales, gooseneck kettles, that kind of thing. You need to weigh out the beans, and then you have to grind them just so – too coarse or too fine and the flavour is all wrong. The water has to be just the right temperature, and then you have to pour it over the coffee beans in just the right way in several stages so all the gasses and everything behave the way they need to. Even if you’re brewing it right, you still need high quality beans to make a good drink, which have to be picked and shipped all the way around the world so you can buy them.”

Nico frowned. She hadn’t really been expecting to get a lecture on being an amateur barista. “Seems like a lot of work for such a tiny thing. Why don’t you get the instant stuff?”

“Because if I’m going to have coffee, I want it to be the best it can possibly be – even if it’s a lot harder.”

The words sat in the air meaningfully for a few moments, and Nico had already begun mulling them over before she realised she’d been tricked.

“Hey, wait a minute! This isn’t about coffee. You’re trying to to teach me a lesson without me realising it!”

Aru drew herself up to her full height, and for a moment looked more impressive than Nico had ever seen her. “That’s right. And it’s not just you. I’m going to help inspire all the children of the world to be the best they can be, by giving them the Christmas they deserve – no matter how hard or impractical it is. That’s Santa’s Job!”

Nico pressed a hand to her forehead. “Uuuu… When I first set out to fight you that one time, I had no idea you’d be this hardcore. I should have just been a shopkeeper instead of getting looped into being your assistant.”

“I’m also a hardcore shopkeeper!” Aru said with a blinding smile, and flashed her a thumbs-up. “Here. I know you said you didn’t want one, but I made a cup of coffee for you anyway. Drink it. It’s a learning experience.”

She looked down at the hot, dark brew before her. It seemed as though she was being made to drink some potion, a special tincture that would sign over her soul to Santahood for ever and ever. But on the other hand, it smelled amazing. She picked it up, looked at her senior meaningfully, and took a sip.

“Ugh… This… How do I say it? It tastes really bad,” she said, screwing up her nose.

“I know, right?” Aru said peacefully, although the corners of her eyes looked suspiciously watery. Maybe it was just from being in the cold and the wind for so long. Maybe. “Making good coffee is so hard that even though I practice all the time, I’m still really bad at it… But having a cup after the delivery run is like a tradition for me. Otherwise I’m too tired to fall asleep, you know?”

Nico took another sip, and let the flavour hit the back of her throat. It didn’t taste any better the second time. “For a moment, you seemed really cool and reliable.”

“Thanks… I think…”

“Well, I should probably get back before my parents realise I’m missing,” she said, and with a grimace knocked back the entire remainder of her coffee at once. “I guess I’ll see you the same time next year.”

Aru shook her head. “I’ll visit you before that, Nico.”

Nico gave her a wan smile. “To check that I’m being a good kid?”

“No. I _know_ you’ll be a good kid. I’ll just visit so we can have fun together instead of only ever meeting up to do work. I also have a present I need to drop by with – from Aru, not Santa.”

Nico stopped for a moment. The cogs turned in her brain, chewing up facts and figures until she had come to a semi-logical conclusion. “It’s a coffee pot, isn’t it?”

“Whaaaaat?!” Aru shouted, slamming her palms on the table. “How did you know? Did you peek? Peeking is bad!”

“I just got the feeling that maybe Santa wants somebody else to make her a cup of awful coffee from time to time.”

She yawned, and put on her coat. It wasn’t red like Aru’s, but now that she thought of it, she wouldn’t look bad in red. Maybe. When she stepped out into the street, the sun was beginning to rise over a bright and happy Christmas Day. She put her hands in her pockets and whistled as she walked.

Later that day, Aru would drop by with a very well-wrapped but not very mysterious present for her – and they would both discover that, no matter how bad Aru’s coffee was, Nico’s was even worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally called 'Earning the Nico Nico Knee' when I was writing it. Written before Nico was added to OJ and her personality expanded upon, so I characterised her as a teenager instead of an 8 year old. Oh well.


	14. Homework

Aru was having one of those days. For other people, ‘those days’ were the days when the toast fell butter side down, when every traffic light was red, and when large, ruthless corporations eagerly tossed them into the bonfire to fuel the engine of capitalism. For Aru, ‘those days’ were the days where she woke up, had breakfast, and then got roped into something stupid before she had even realised it.

To begin with, she wasn’t sure why she was doing homework with QP and Syura. She hadn’t done homework in _years_. She was a responsible adult who owned a business. She was exempt from homework, in the same way that oil barons were exempt from taxes. She had business cards, damnit. They were extremely cute, they cost a bomb and a half to have designed, and she was in the habit of handing them out like confetti at a wedding. Usually they came back to her like confetti at a wedding as well, in innumerable tiny pieces, but she had taken the first of many steps on the long road to professionalism.

But it seemed that even her deadliest combination of whining and business cards couldn’t get her out of QP’s study meet, at least not with her kneecaps intact. So she had moved onto the second of her many, many questions: who on Earth needed to know this stuff? She had offered to help with geography, because geography was something she was _good_ at. She regularly circumnavigated the globe; nobody could name capital cities quite like she could. But QP’s geography homework wasn’t about capital cities. It wasn’t even about maps. It was about things like soil erosion in riverbeds, undersea tectonic plates, and the rain cycle. Last time Aru had checked, ‘geo’ meant earth, so why were all the questions about water? That was a whole classical element away. Plato would be spinning in his grave so hard that he’d drill down into the planet’s core.

As it turned out, though, QP also had many questions. Most of them were directed at Syura, and very few of them were flattering.

“How can you be bad at math? You do programming,” she pointed out, as Syura failed to carry the one. Maths teachers always wanted Syura to carry the one, and someday soon she was going to carry it all the way up Mount Doom and throw it back into the hellfire where it belonged.

“How can _you_ be bad at math? You’re a dog!” the redhead snapped.

“Yeah, but you don’t _need_ math to be a dog. For programmers, you kinda do.”

“Look, I major in game design and do programming on the side. Whenever I need to code anything, what I do is start my computer, slam three energy drinks in a row, and then it’s done by the time the room stops spinning.”

QP looked at her with something that would have been pity, had she not used up all her emotional fortitude on a fifteen question biology worksheet. “You’re gonna die before you’re thirty-five, guaranteed.”

Having established this as an incontrovertible fact, she went back to chipping away at English Literature. She liked her English Lit teacher, who was a personable woman with a fondness for puns. If she came in with the excuse that a dog ate her homework, she would probably get away with it, provided she had a half-eaten worksheet in her lunchbox. She didn’t know whether she wanted to eat that much paper, though. Sure, it was annoying trying to pretend she knew what the author was thinking with every single word choice, but was it worth dining on tree pulp? Probably not. On the plus side, she was making firm strides towards forming her own school of literary theory, based on the idea that most of the little niggly bits of creative fiction were actually an expression of what the author wanted for breakfast. Nobody was taking it seriously, but that was fine. It meant it could be a parody, only to become a dark portent of the future once the apocalypse came and toast became a luxury good. That was how These Things Worked™.

When she had successfully plucked a two page essay out of her brain and transcribed it in roughly the right order, she set about making Aru give her a pop quiz on her business studies. It went swimmingly, in the sense that she felt out of her depth and constantly on the cusp of drowning.

“What is a loss leader?” Aru asked.

Despite being in an entirely different business studies class, Syura was the one who answered. “Easy. That’s the stage 1 midboss.”

“Incorrect. What does SWOT stand for?”

“Strong Wandering Overpowered Terrors.”

“Incorrect. What is gross profit?”

“When you can see the future, but there’s no shower in it.”

“That’s zero out of three, which I’m pretty sure is a fail.” She slumped over the table and sighed. Even if it wasn’t really _her_ schoolwork, it made her back ache for some reason. With her head against the cool wood, she almost felt comfortable – but for the scritch-scratch of the pen nibs right next to her long, fluffy ears. “Why didn’t you ask Krila to come?”

QP’s head tilted up as she thought of her answer, almost as though the correct response was written on the ceiling. Sadly, she had already tried writing the answers on the ceiling during a mock exam, and it hadn’t gone well. If she wrote big enough to see, there just wasn’t enough ceiling for all her notes; if she squished it all in, she would need telescopic eyes.

“Oh, it’s her busy season. She makes good luck charms and sells them outside the library,” Syura explained.

“Do they work?”

“I sure hope so. I bought eight already, but I’m thinking of making it a round ten, just to be sure.”

“It’s a pity,” QP said, furrowing her brows. “She’s tall, so I bet she knows lots of stuff.”

Aru, who had very long legs and counted her ears towards her overall height, was very interested in this proposed correlation between tallness and intelligence. She demanded more details.

“Well, think about it. All of the teachers and professors are way taller than we are, right? And they’re also way smarter. My theory is that you can only have so much knowledge inside you, and when you hit that limit, your body grows so there’s more of you to store it in.” Her tail wagged as she confidently explained her hypothesis.

“That means you’re gonna be short forever,” Syura replied dryly, and ducked the pencil case QP launched at her head. “But anyway, don’t you think it’s actually the opposite? _I_ think that as your brain gets fuller, it gets heavier and squishes your body down underneath it. Also, it sucks the calories away from the rest of your body, so you actually get shorter and skinnier the smarter you get. That’s why all the _really_ smart kids are, like, Dweebulons from the planet Dweeblord.”

“ _My_ theory is you should both pay more attention in biology,” Aru sighed. She didn’t say that ‘Dweebulon from the planet Dweeblord’ was more or less exactly how she would describe Syura, not least because Syura would take this as evidence of how smart she was.

“I’d totally trade an inch off my height for an A in History,” QP sniffed. “It’s not like I need to be tall, anyway. I can fly.” She demonstrated her point by floating leisurely up off her chair and bumping her head on the light fitting, at which point she descended rather less gracefully and with a pronounced yelp, followed swiftly by the lightbulb she had knocked free. When it hit the ground it broke with a loud pop that reminded all three of them that they were mortal – mostly mortal, in QP’s case – and no amount of academia would save them from being skewered in the heart by a shard of molten lightbulb glass. Syura was fairly sure shards of lightbulb glass were the modern day equivalents of stone-age obsidian knives, and if Krila ever went off the deep end and started sacrificing victims to her dark gods, that was what she would use.

Sadly, Krila would have been disappointed, because Aru was an expert in this exact situation. She had a 2nd Dan in fairy lights; while her friends were out partying, she studied the LED and mastered the art of strand manipulation. (Many wondered why martial arts schools offered qualifications in fairy light mastery; few remembered that a strand of fairy lights was essentially a collection of small, electric firebombs strung along a garotting wire.) In mere moments, she had masterfully swept the glass from the ground and spirited a new lightbulb into the fitting, so that her friends could continue to study under her watchful, if mostly clueless, eye.

“So, QP. Don’t take this the wrong way,” Aru began. It wasn’t a very reassuring beginning. QP had noticed that people said ‘don’t take this the wrong way’ only when they would absolutely have taken it the wrong way themselves in the same situation. “But you’re not doing great at English, Math, most of Science, History, Geography… what schoolwork are you actually _good_ at?”

QP looked at her seriously before breaking out in a golden, glorious smile. It was peaceful, magnificent. Like being looked down on by a wise king, or a monk feeling the first twinges of understanding. A truly beatific smile that brought calm to Aru’s soul. Opposite her, Syura was wearing a scowl every bit as sour as QP’s smile was euphoric. They answered at once, their voices in unison:

“Tests.”

“It’s _stupid_. It’s not how real life works,” Syura continued, immediately launching into a shower of vitriol. “When I make a game, I don’t just turn on my computer and hammer one out in an hour. I work at it for months at a time, little by little, advancing and improving every single day. That’s how you do jobs. That’s how you do _everything_. When they grade us based on tests, they’re not actually getting any idea of how that knowledge translates into real life and real projects. They’re testing how well we do with stupid artificial pressure.”

QP wasn’t far behind with her rebuttal. “That’s just because you see everything as videogames, though. I think a lot of things are like cooking, or sports. Sure, you can prepare ahead of time a bit, and that makes it easier, but there’s always a limit to that, right? Eventually you just have to get out there and do it. You have to be able to use what you’ve learned in the moment, no matter how bad the conditions are. That’s why whenever we fight, I always win – I’m just better at doing stuff when I really need to.” She paused. “Also, being good at tests means I can slack off for most of the year and then cram to get a good grade. And I don’t turn up to every class on half an hour’s sleep, like you do.”

Aru shook her head. It was a hard truth to realise, but actually, life demanded you to get good at both. Turning up to a big day with no preparation was a bit like wandering into a wild west shootout armed with your two fists and a bullseye on your back. But the preparation was just that: preparation. When the time came to put things into practice, life didn’t particularly give a damn if you’d done your coursework or not. When the time came to put up or shut up, the choice was entirely binary. There was no easy answer, and no easy way to teach it.

Having not been paid to distil the struggles of education into a single glib soundbite, Aru didn’t, and instead told QP that slacking off in school was naughty. Naughty was a loaded word in Aru’s vocabulary; there was naughty, and there was Naughty, and QP had not yet figured out how to tell if she was saying it with a capital letter or not. It could be a velvet glove or an iron fist, and she wouldn't know until she felt the sting.

“Have you ever considered being a teacher, Aru? I learn stuff from you all the time,” QP said. This was true, but it was also flattery to try and get in Santa’s good side; luckily, Santa’s good side was about as wide as the antarctic wastes, and her smile was a good indication that QP’s naughty list status, if she had been on it, was temporarily revoked.

“I don’t know,” Syura said. “I think she might not be scary enough to be a teacher. Also, she needs to get better at geography.”

Aru stood up, and it became apparent that she was not only much taller than Syura was, but also capable of focusing the distilled essence of winter into a scowl that would freeze your heart and strip the paint from your bicycle. “I _know_ geography.”

At that point, Syura decided that if Aru had said baking cookies was geography, she would have cheerfully agreed in an attempt to not get thrown out of a second story window. That was the problem with being able to fly, she found. People could throw you out of windows whenever they liked and not expect you to die, which was very undignified. Most people expected to get thrown out of windows once, maybe twice, in their entire life. She had hit double digits in defenestrations, and she wasn’t even an adult yet. It was unsustainable, economically and environmentally. Syura was always thinking about the environment, and how to avoid interacting with it. Her groundbreaking solution was to stay at home and play videogames. It was a wonder nobody had ever thought of it before.

Eventually – when Aru was satisfied that Syura knew her isoceles from her equilateral, and that QP’s sociology homework was not just ‘woof’ written in ten different dialects – the study session was called to a close, partly because their work was done, and partly because all three of them had been consumed by a lust for pizza, which was one of the many occupational risks of studying. Education could teach them many things, but there are some things that can only be learned by splitting the cost of a deep-dish pie – like compromise, diplomacy, and why pepperoni is overrated. And as the age-old contest for the first slice began, they learned one more, very important thing.

The value of friendship isn’t measured in the number of pizza slices you eat. It’s measured in the number you don’t have to pay for.


	15. Baseball (I)

Syura arched an eyebrow, or at least tried to. She was, technically, an eyebrow impaired individual; hers started out strong, but became so light and pale halfway through that people accused her of shaving them, or otherwise made helpful suggestions involving eyebrow pencils. Arming Syura with an eyebrow pencil was like giving a crayon to a toddler: she would draw on surfaces that were never meant to be drawn on, and smudge things never meant to be smudged. She had accepted the onus of a demi-browed existence, but occasionally the natural urge to wiggle them around still reared its ugly head.

“You’re saying you can beat me? At _baseball_?” she asked flatly. “QP, you don’t know who you’re dealing with, do you?”

QP blinked slowly, although her tail began to wag. She’d known Syura since they were both little kids, and she’d never shown any particular aptitude for sports. It didn’t seem like a bold claim to suggest that an active and energetic dog with good grades in PE could beat a girl whose biggest muscles were in her palms. But whatever had got Syura riled up, it was at least bound to be interesting, so she decided to play along. “Sure I do. And you’re just mad because Krila beat you at Pokem–”

“She did _not_ beat me,” Syura contended hotly. “We agreed three sets of three, and we got our handhelds confiscated after the first one.”

“Because you were yelling about it and the teachers came.”

“I was yelling because it was unexpected, okay?! Turns out she’s actually _great_ at ’mons games. But that’s not the point.”

QP opened her mouth in quiet wonder. Usually, Syura didn’t have a point, or she lost it halfway through any game-related speech. She was surprised and vaguely proud of her best friend, and wordlessly offered her a carton of banana flavoured milk from her lunch box. Syura knocked it aside, which was fine, because neither of them actually liked banana flavoured milk but QP kept buying it.

“The _point_ is that baseball isn’t your game. You’re good at sport, but you suck at batting and you suck at pitching. You wanna know why? It’s because baseball is about more than raw athleticism.” Syura puffed her chest out, which usually was a sign she was going to say something stupid. “It’s about numbers.”

QP considered this. It was true that baseball had a lot of numbers in it. The score, for example, and the amount of players, and the players always had shirts with numbers on the back. It did seem like too much maths for an honest game. But fundamentally, it was just taking a chunk of wood, hitting a ball with it as hard as you could, and then running around a lot. In summary, it seemed like Syura was out of her mind, a sentiment she didn’t hesitate to relay.

“No way. When you look at baseball, it has one of the highest concentrations of stats of _any_ sports game. You can use past records to predict almost anything to a reasonable degree of accuracy. And on the management front, a good grasp of markets, wages and finance can turn a historically lacklustre team into a real contender in the blink of an eye. There’s strategy on every level. No matter how you look at it, the truth is this: baseball is the sport of nerds!”

She let this declaration ring through the air of the school, which attracted a number of stares. Thankfully, none of them belonged the school baseball team, who would have been happy to inform her that they were, in fact, not just nerds – they were nerds with baseball bats, which accorded them a much higher position in the school pecking order. A man with a big stick is often treated more respectfully than a man without one.

QP’s tail began to wag faster.

“Yeah, but all the stats in the world can’t make you good with a bat. I don’t think you’d stand a chance against me at all,” QP said, and then, without knowing it, said some of the most dangerous words in the English language. “Games and real life aren’t the same thing, you know?”

To say that Syura erupted would probably be disrespectful to volcanoes, which, while usually smelly, were generally large and imposing. Syura generally lacked the sulphurous odour, but also lacked the stature to make her anger impressive. But she _tried_ to erupt, and that was half the battle.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t use the skills I learned as a gamer! Reaction speed, hand-eye co-ordination, the ability to mix a green herb with a red one to fully recover health! Those are my weapons, QP! What do you have?”

She jabbed her finger at QP’s chest as she spoke, which was a very brave and dangerous thing to be doing. For various reasons, QP preferred to keep Syura’s hands as far away from her chest as she could – on another continent, if possible, but if not, detaching them from Syura seemed like a good way to handle the situation. Unfortunately, the knives at the school canteen just weren’t sharp enough to saw somebody’s hand off at the wrist. They never were.

“Well, for one, I don’t suck at sport,” she replied mildly. “And I do regular exercise, which you don’t. And my eyes are good, since I don’t spend all my time looking at a computer screen.”

Syura rose to her full height – for what it was worth – and puffed out her chest. “You’re just one person, though. Baseball is about the whole team. And I bet a whole _case_ of pudding that a team with _my_ leadership would crush one with you leading it.”

QP’s ears pricked up. There were four puddings in a package, and eight packages in a case. A case of pudding was sixty four puddings. That was a not inconsiderable amount of pudding, and she needed to consume it – purely in the interests of world peace and public safety, of course.

“Deal.”

* * *

The news spread across the school like wildfire, and like wildfires caused a lot of screaming and devastation. It was Syura’s Sluggers versus the Pudding Packers, two nascent teams that didn’t exist yet and should probably never be allowed to exist at all. Everybody wanted to see it and no-one wanted to be a part of it; bets were being taken, lots were being drawn, and QP and Syura were both being studiously avoided as they beat the drum of recruitment.

“Krila! I want you on my team,” QP bellowed the next day as she stormed into the cafeteria. “You always get picked last in sports, so this time I’m picking you first!”

The cafeteria stood in shock as a single package of red bean bread fell to the floor, with no effort made to retrieve it. For a moment, all was silent, and all was still. Like a deer in the headlights, Krila turned her one, baleful eye towards QP. Whispers began to travel around the massed students – was it really fair to strong-arm Krila, who was a pitiable loner, like this? Shouldn’t somebody stand up for her?

“You… you would harness my power? For a sports game? A pitiful celebration of athletics?” Krila asked, in her most booming and theatrical voice.

“Sure! Sports are more fun with friends,” QP nodded, her tail wagging slowly. “Join my team, Krila. I won’t let Syura have you.”

The silence grew, like suspicious mould on a discarded pizza slice. There were a lot of discarded pizza slices in the school canteen, which was suspicious by itself.

“Very well. My contract… is with the Beast God…!” Krila declared, when she felt the timing was right. As always, she put every ounce of dramatic gravitas into her statement, and did such a good job that nobody even realised she was crying tears of quiet joy, until her eyepatch got soggy.

She lurched towards QP for an awkward but enthusiastic hug, and as she did, students began to sidle out of the cafeteria and quietly re-assess their betting strategies. On one hand, QP now had a single team mate, which was a single team mate more than Syura had managed. On the other, her team mate was notorious for wearing her eyepatch in PE lessons, lacking any hint of depth perception or hand-eye co-ordination, and managing to be both perennially malnourished and somehow pudgy at the same time. The Pudding Packers were still the stronger team, for the moment, but it illuminated that QP was very stupid in her her recruitment strategies. Quietly, but irresistibly, the odds began to shift towards Syura’s Sluggers.

Syura’s Sluggers, however, had their own problems, the fact that they hadn’t really earned their pluralisation. The team motto of ‘Love, Justice, and Videogames’ was not really going over quite as well as Syura had hoped; she had bet on the strength of her management skills, but currently she had nothing to manage.

It was time to enact Plan A: Desperate Measures. (Plans B and C were also ‘Desperate Measures’, but with added exclamation marks.)

* * *

 

“Join my baseball team,” she said, slapping her wallet on the counter.

Arthur looked down at her with barely disguised disdain. Although the sound of a wallet being placed on his counter was extremely invigorating, he was already tired from a long day of capitalism, and had been looking forward to idling away the rest of the shift reading a baking magazine. Contrary to popular opinion, he was a keen baker, with a very large collection of aprons. Somebody had once told him that real man didn’t wear aprons, and he had politely disagreed and then politely applied violence to back up his point. Real men wore aprons because real men wore fine-quality tailored shirts, and weren’t stupid enough to go anywhere near cookie dough without at least some rudimentary protective equipment.

“Does this look like a baseball dugout? Get lost,” he said, and continued his quest to find a cake that had macademia nuts, but wasn’t a coffee cake. Nico loved macademias, hated coffee – even though she insisted on making his morning brew these days. To be fair to her, she made it almost as well as he did, although she didn’t put a shot of whisky in while nobody was looking. The whisky was mandatory, because giving Arthur a stimulant without an accompanying depressant was Bad News, and so he generally tended to tip the coffee into the plant pot. In the name of public safety, of course.

“Listen. I’m going to be totally honest with you,” Syura lied. “I made a bet with a friend. A dumb bet. So I need to beat her in a game of baseball. I put my pride on the line in a sporting competition. Right there, in that wallet, is all the money I made from my last doujin game. It’s the symbol of my entrepreneurial spirit! I’m not asking for much. All I want you to do is come down to the park for one afternoon and knock out a few $8 taxi rides with those old man muscles of yours.”

“I ain’t that old,” he grumbled. But his scheming mercantile mind was already eyeing up the possibilities. If a brat like Syura was playing ball, she was probably wanting to do it on the school field. It would be an event. Parents would turn out to see their kids mess up easy catches and knock fastballs into the dirt. He had plenty of sports equipment in his store backstock – little boys were always asking for bats and catcher mitt’s. Nine players a team meant eighteen bats and uniforms he could sell to the school organisers at ‘discount’ prices, maybe earning some repeat trade. If it blew up enough, the local media might even catch a whiff of it. It’d be free publicity, the best kind there was. He could milk a lot of cash from an afternoon’s work, if he was lucky and diligent. And when you were naturally equipped with a pair of rabbit’s feet, luck wasn’t that hard to find. There was just one last factor to take into consideration.

“How much is in that wallet?” he asked.

Several expressions whirled across Syura’s face, as quickly as the dancing colours on a roulette wheel; after a few seconds of emotional incoherence, she eventually landed on ‘indignant’.

“That’s not how it’s supposed to go!” she said, with a pout that really belonged on somebody twice her age and half her weight. “You’re not supposed to ask _questions!_ You’re supposed to take the opportunity to boost your stupid ego by crushing a bunch of teenagers at stickball, and become moved by my merchant’s spirit!”

“Yeah, well. I’d be a lot more moved if you slipped me a fifty.” Arthur sighed, and went back to his magazine. “Time is money. If you want my time, you pay me. Asking for a fair wage isn’t a luxury. It’s basic self-respect.”

He jerked his head towards the door as if to indicate the matter was closed, and that might well have been the end of it if Aru had not picked that moment to walk into the room, wearing her most thoughtful expression. Aru’s thoughtful expression was the most dangerous one she had, because unlike anyone she hung around with, she was actually smart enough that the thoughts might go somewhere.

“A baseball game, huh? I think you should go, Arthur. It’d be a great chance to spend some quality time with Nico, wouldn’t it? I’m sure she’d love to see what you can do with a bat.”

Arthur’s skill with a bat mostly extended to breaking people’s kneecaps, and Aru knew it. But she _did_ have a point. What kind of father would he be if he didn’t seize the opportunity to show off to his daughter, now that one had been presented to him? If he was lucky, he might even get the chance to be embarrassing, which was worth double the parenting points. Arthur nodded, slowly. Despite all appearances, he was a dad first and a merchant second.

“…Fine. Tell you what. You let Nico on your team as well, and I’ll make it work. Don’t get me wrong – I still expect to get paid. But I’ll set you up some credit. Put it on your tab.”

He held his hand out to shake, and Syura wouldn’t have grabbed it faster if it had contained one million dollars and a thoroughbred pony – which, to be fair it might have, because as hands went it was large and capacious: perfect for catching balls, and also wrapping around the necks of people who reneged on their promise to slip him a fifty.

“Alright! This means our team is 1.33 repeating times as good as QP’s!” Syura declared. “Let’s turn this into a sweep. Aru, what would it take to get you on my baseball team?”

Aru pondered the question, because Syura had just very kindly handed her a blank cheque – an act of true bravery that deserved some amount of respect. And the more she thought about it, the more she realised that she was, at heart, a very practical bunny, at least when she wasn’t out of her mind with worry about her presents.

“I want the rights to the concessions,” she said, with a smile far too sweet to be good for anybody.

Arthur slowly took off his sunglasses, which he wore both indoors and at night, so that the look of utter defeat on his face was known to all. Aru had outmanoeuvred him. The iron law of baseball was that a baseball fan would eat anything you presented them with, provided you called it a hot-dog; with her knack for training Rbits and ReBits, she would have a huge, mobile catering corps that could serve a whole crowd at once, with minimum quality products and maximum quality margins. People sometimes wondered why he, a successful self-employed toy-store owner, would work behind the counter of the Rbit Room at Aru’s behest. The fact that Aru was going to rake in money hand-over-fist while he’d settled for a quick fifty and some nascent opportunities was a large part of his reason.

And the best thing about it – the thing that really marked her out as a master – was that Syura didn’t know she was losing a single thing.

“Done and done! Alright, so we’re now four versus two. My first order as team captain is to go out and find some more team members, because people like you better than me. After that, we’ll start scheduling some practice sessions! I’ll meet you tomorrow at sixteen-hundred hours to discuss our results. Ten-hut!”

After telling them to stand to attention, she turned around and marched from the store, her little chest puffed out as far as it would go. They watched her as she went, quietly boggled by her ability at manufacturing both nonsense and opportunities for delicious, delicious profit.

After a few moments had passed, Arthur took a cigarette from his jacket pocket and pretended to light it. (He wasn’t allowed a lighter behind the counter.)

“You sure this is alright? You’re going up against that dog girl. Isn’t she your friend?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s fine. She won’t hold it against us,” she said, with a smile that was still sickly sweet. “We’re going to lose anyway. Now, grab me the phone book. I have a few calls to make about our catering…”


	16. Good Girl

It was a cold night, and Aru, snuggled very deep under the covers, was considering a change of career.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like being a holiday rabbit. She loved it. It gave her a chance to bring genuine joy to the faces of children, where it would stay for about fourteen seconds and then be devoured by the nascent evil of excessive consumerism. It gave her direction and purpose; no matter how aimless the rest of her life might become, she could always be sure that she was Santa, that she had a place in the world set out for her. Most rabbits, she noted sadly, didn’t have a place in the world, but did have a place at the table.

But sometimes she thought it might be quite nice to transition to, you know, _other_ holiday related career paths. Ones that made better use of her unique attributes. Like being the Easter bunny, for example, although she was rather hoping that the eggs weren’t produced in quite the way she assumed they were, in which case she would take an indefinite rain check on that idea. Or, perhaps, one of the rabbits who pounded New Year’s mocchi on the moon. Now _there_ was a job: honest labour, regular hours, no requirement to make complex moral judgements, and you got a massive hammer as soon as you signed up. There were a lot of things Aru could do with a massive hammer.

Right now, the first thing she would do with a massive hammer was smash her phone into billions and billions of atom-sized pieces, because it kept ringing. She understood that ringing, usually, was considering a feature and not a bug, but at half past two in the morning she felt rather differently about it. Besides, smashing the phone with a hammer was technically the lesser of two evils; the other option was to smash the caller with a giant hammer, which would probably take longer to clean up afterwards.

After two ring cycles, she regretfully burrowed her way out of the nest of duvets, seized her phone and, bravely resisting the urge to toss it at the wall, pressed the answer button.

“QP, what is it?” she asked.

“ _Hi, Aru. Sorry to ring you so late._ _Um. I was just wondering–”_

“Yes?” Aru asked, and resigned herself to the question she knew was coming next.

“ _Am I… Am I a good girl?”_

Aru covered the mouthpiece for a moment as she composed herself, reaching deep down into her heart to drink from the well of Patience that she had built there. She treated patience like an old, broken detective treated the contents of his hip-flask: limited in supply, hard to replenish, and dangerous if taken too liberally. Sometimes, it was healthier to get angry. But she didn’t quite think she’d reached that point. Not yet.

“QP, you know you can’t keep doing this, right…? It’s a school night. You should be asleep. We should _both_ be asleep,” she said, as reasonably as possible. “This is the third time in two weeks…”

“ _I know, but me and Syura were watching that one movie where the two dogs and a cat get lost and have to find their way home, and it just got me thinking, so I just… I wanted to know if I’ve been a good girl this year. That’s all.”_

“QP… I understand, but just because you’re friends with Santa, it doesn’t mean you can abuse my powers. Anyway, it’s only March.”

QP didn’t respond, but the tell-tale sound of muffled whining floated over the receiver. If the dog girl had one fault – and she definitely had a lot more than one, but for the sake of simplicity, one fault – it was that her ego was too big for her body. In fact, if one went by the usual ego-to-bodyweight ratios, QP really ought to have been born a giraffe. But most of the time, her inflated self-estimation was inert; she simply accepted that she was cute and loveable and awe-inspiring, and got on with the rest of her life. She didn’t brandish it like a weapon; she didn’t hide behind it like a shield. It was just _there_ , existing.

But an ego like that needed a certain amount of maintenance, and even with QP’s thickheadedness, it still took a few knocks from time to time. Sometimes, it seemed, QP just needed to be told that she was a Good Girl, and naturally, she looked to Aru – or, rather, Santa, the final arbitrator on which Girls were Good and which were Bad – to provide it.

And she _was_ a good girl. Probably. It was actually a matter of contention. On the great scales of Naughty and Nice, QP weighed in at ‘Cosmic Pudding Entity whose Domain quietly staves off Pudding-Related Confrontations and the inevitable Complete Societal Collapse they entail.’ In other words, she could get away with a lot of Naughty before she even started moving the needle of Santa’s judgement. On a more personal level, Aru was just a tiny bit biased over whether one of her best friends and confidants was a good person or not.

“Look, QP,” Aru said soothingly, “unless you’ve done something really bad since the last time you asked, you’re probably a good girl.”

“ _Yeah, but… I keep wondering. Am I good **enough** girl? Could I be being **more** good? What if I started to fight crime?”_

She already fought crime, at least from Aru’s understanding of things. Admittedly it was pudding-related crime, mostly perpetrated by members of Waruda, but she was still single-handedly disarming a criminal organisation. Before Aru could say this, however, QP continued:

“ _But to do that, I’d need super powers. If I ask for super powers for Christmas, is that a thing you can do?”_

“Super powers,” Aru repeated, flatly. “You mean, _other_ than flying, and being able to fire magical bullets, and having an innate understanding of the hearts of rabbits, and whatever else you got as Sweet Guardian?”

QP at least had the good grace to hesitate for a moment before she replied. _“Yeah, bu_ _t_ _those aren’t really super powers. They’re more like hobbies.”_

This was enough like moon-logic that Aru’s thoughts drifted briefly back to her mochi-pounding ambitions, which QP took as the thoughtful, encouraging kind of silence rather than the just plain bewildered kind.

“ _I guess I could be a superhero without powers. Like Batman, except, you know, a dog. And not a man. But I’d need a costume. Can you help me think of costume ideas?”_

Aru’s voice became wooden. “QP, it’s 2am.”

“ _Yeah, but I’ll be super quick, I prom–”_

Now there was a hint of iron in it. “QP. It’s 2am.”

“ _Just for a min–”_

Now her tone was steely, hard and cutting. “QP. It is _2am._ ”

“ _...Okaaaay. I’ll come over after school tomorrow and tell you about it then,”_ QP said, deflating slightly. _“Sorry for keeping you up so late. Goodnight, Aru!”_

The phone clicked off. Aru put it very gently back on the night stand, closed her eyes, and settled into the immediate, heavy sleep of the exhausted.

In her dreams, she had a giant hammer. And she was very gently tapping QP on the head with it.

* * *

 

“Syura, am I a good girl?”

Syura lifted her head from the desk, which was very difficult. The movie that had tipped QP into existential crisis had kept her up late, and then she had tried to do some debugging on her latest game, which had kept her up even longer. The problem was that the dragons who were supposed to be breathing fireballs were suddenly breathing wasps, which she didn’t even remember coding the assets for, and which immediately started to fight the dragons. That by itself would have been a funny little interaction she could leave in the game – maybe strip it out and retool it into a jokey little boss fight with a wasp-breathing dragon – but the problem was that the wasps kept winning, because the dragon couldn’t hit them without fire breath and every time it tried to breath fire it just made more wasps. The wasps only did one damage per attack, but there were hundreds of them. Eventually the dragon just died through scratch damage, and one lucky wasp received enough exp to become a legendary monster in its own right, usually taking the opportunity to slay everything else in the cave and go on a horrifying rampage in the game world, until it met another legendary dragonspawn wasp and fought it for dominance. It was the darkest timeline, and she didn’t know how to fix it.

Having successfully created Fantasy Wasp Conquest Simulator, she planned to un-create it after school, on a ration of two-and-a-half hours of sleep and with her head filled with algebra homework – a feat that would be completely impossible, if she hadn’t dosed herself with a truly impressive amount of caffeine. Probably more than was strictly safe, really, although she was still young and spry, so it would _probably_ work out. Was caffeine a hallucinogen? She hoped not. But when the effects hit, she was sure she’d find out.

“Sure. Whatever,” she said, after QP’s question had percolated in her brain like coffee in… in some kind of machine that produced coffee. She didn’t really know anything about coffee. As far as she knew, it was a natural by-product of capitalism and vending machines, and that was the way she liked it.

“Syura!”

She opened one bleary eye and found one of QP’s big, soulful, less bleary eyes staring back. It seemed she had also assumed the head-on-desk position, with her nose about two inches from Syura’s. It was a very boopable nose, rounded like a button. QP very rarely put her face this close to hers, for any number of reasons that were sensible and not very fun, and the effect it had was pronounced.

“Come _on_ , Syura. Get up and take it seriously. I need some advice on this.”  
“Oh, yeah. I’m up,” Syura mumbled. “So, what’s your problem? If you’re worried about being a good girl, just do good stuff, right? Shift your alignment towards Lawful Good, that kind of thing.”

QP frowned. She had always argued that dogs were Lawful Good by default; they were naturally fond of packs and hierarchies, and there was no dog that _wanted_ to be a bad dog – just dogs that were good dogs for bad people. She was only part-dog, so she only got part of the effect, but fundamentally she considered herself to on the same kind of spectrum, even though she sometimes broke a few little laws where noise levels and property damage were concerned. But that was like penalising a firefighter for chopping down a door to rescue somebody from a burning building – there was a greater good to think about.

“Well,” she said at last, “I was thinking about that, and I decided to try fighting crime. I just need a good costume to do it in. You’re a nerd, so you ought to know good costumes, right?”

“How many times do I have to explain this? There’s _different types_ _of nerd_ , QP, and I’m not a comics nerd. I don’t know anything about superheroes or whatever, unless they appear in games. And even then, the games usually aren’t that good, so I skip them to play indie releases.”

QP brought her fist down on the table, startling almost everybody in the classroom – including the teacher, who, luckily, was already vaguely afraid of her. There were rumours of her being spotted with delinquents, even beating them up from time to time. The unwritten law was that QP only cared about pudding, and if you valued your life, you’d give her no reason to change that fact.

“Come _on_ , Syura. I thought you’d be all over this, you know? I’m basically asking, if you had to put me in _any_ superhero costume, which one would it be?”

When it was phrased like that, it became a much more attractive question – one that, in other circumstances, Syura would have taken some quality time on. She chewed the end of her pencil – or maybe it was Qp’s pencil, but somebody had a pencil and it was in her mouth and she was taking nourishment from the bracing flavour of wood and graphite – as she thought.

“Well, it’s gotta be skintight. That’s the rule for superhero costumes, right? You don’t really have the bust for one of those cleavage showing ones… so I think maybe a spandex bodysuit might be the thing…”

Her mind drifted a little further along the line, and the more she saw in her mind’s eye, the more she liked it. QP didn’t exactly have a _heroic_ build – mostly she was straight up and down, with the occasional pudding deposit – but she was an active girl, and that meant she was the proud owner of shapely legs. Spandex QP, very suddenly, had become relevant to Syura’s interests.

“No way,” QP said bluntly. “Spandex and all that stuff _sucks_. You have to poke a hole for your tail, right? And then when you do stuff, your tail moves around, so the hole frays and it gets bigger, so eventually you just have this big hole in your costume where everyone’s looking at your butt.”

Syura\ puffed her chest out and tried to assume an air of authority. “Well, that’s just a part of being a superhero, right? Your duty isn’t just to fight crime or protect people. It’s to inspire them as well!”

“With my butt?”

“With your butt!”

QP went very quiet, which was a bad sign. When she was quiet it meant she was thinking, and a QP with the capacity for logical thought was an entirely different proposition to the QP they knew day to day. Syura shuddered; she felt like she had rolled a natural one for her persuade check. Was it worth rolling diplomacy in a desparate attempt to salvage the situation?

Her heart said maybe, but her head – which, in the interim, had refilled itself with haze and cotton, said no. Forsaking both her friend and her algebra homework, she laid her head down to sleep – and to dream of the great armoured dragowasp, which was now wandering its way out of her RPG and into a shmup, where it was much better suited.

* * *

 

“Krila. Am I a good girl?”

Krila scratched her chin ominously, and then scratched QP’s chin ominously, and then went back to scratching ominous designs in her notebook with a mechanical pencil. Every art class was an opportunity for a new dark creation, and for a member of Waruda, every class was an art class waiting to happen.

Lunchtime, when not occupied by schemes to get food, was also art class, but came with the added challenge of making sure none of the crowding, faceless students looked at her notebook. Nobody ever tried to look at her notebook, but she was still fiercely protective of it, knowing that the evil inscriptions within could cause mass panic and disrupt her dark ambitions. Previously she had dealt with her need for privacy by huddling away in the sallow, murky corners of the schoolyard, but nowadays she just sat with QP, who had powerful bully-repelling properties and who never tried to sneak a peek at the book herself, mainly because books were not pudding and therefore beneath her notice.

“Krila?”

Sighing, the dark apostle turned to scratch QP’s chin again. She was allowed to scratch QP’s chin, because she wasn’t weird about it like Syura was. Syura wanted to scratch QP’s chin for her own perverted pleasure, whereas Krila merely saw it as a gesture of thanks for the various improvements QP brought in her own life. Before she joined Waruda, she had been an awkward loner; when she threw her lot in with an evil organisation, she finally knew the sweet nectar of companionship. Now, by two-timing that organisation with a bunch of mostly neutral but volatile schoolgirls, she was surrounded by friendship and leftover lunch snacks wherever she went. Never before had Krilalaris had it so good; truly, her life had entered a golden age, the picturesque harmony before the inevitable twilight of the gods.

“It is regrettable,” Krila said cautiously, “but I believe it to be true. Despite your nature as a divine beast, I fear the dark and rugose gods that dwell in my heart would never accept your worship.”

QP didn’t say anything for a moment, because that would disrupt her chin-scratch, and she _did_ love a good chin-scratch. But as soon as Krila’s fingers stopped moving, she gave a sigh of dreamy contentment and continued her enquiries. “But I could always be _more_ good, right?”

Krila frowned. This was a dangerous line of enquiries. QP’s current level of goodness was already high, but it was at least a meandering, aimless kind of goodness – a strictly reactive benevolence, bestowed only when an occasion for it appeared. In other words, it was still _mostly_ compatible with Krila’s worldview, because for a good 75% of the time, QP’s goodness as completely inert.

“What if,” QP continued, “I was a superhero? Then I could wear a cool costume, and make people’s lives even better! Wouldn’t that be awesome?”

“ _No!”_

This was a shout that, in any other cafeteria, would have brought all other conversations to a halt. But Ebimanyou School was full of very passionate, shout-y individuals, and the student corpus had just learned to deal with it. It was a source of great irritation to a lot of people, since it meant their dramatic exclamations lacked a certain gravitas without a hushed awe to follow in their wake.

“If you were a superhero–” Krila choked on the words themselves, but carried on. “If you were a superhero… we would be mortal enemies, you and I. Never again could I pacify you by scratching your chin, and never again could you supplicate the dark gods by offering up your fruit snacks to their apostle. Ruination… it would bring ruination upon us both!”

She slammed her fists down on the lunch table, which was less than advisable, because the lunch table was usually cheaper than the lunches that were balanced precariously upon it. There was a loud, metallic creak as the table legs conferred upon whether to buckle beneath the force of Krila’s soap opera acting. In the end, with two votes nay and one abstaining, the table held – for today.

QP held her hands up in appeasement. “I-it’s fine, Krila. It was just a hypothetical, you know? Hey, calm down. You can help me eat my animal crackers.”

Krila gave a deep, nasally sniff. “…Can I have the giraffes?”

“And the lions, just like always.”

The lunch room held its collective breath, or would have, if anybody cared.

“...I can accept these terms. The contract is made,” Krila said finally, and took a giraffe cracker. A tear dribbled down from beneath her eyepatch as she carefully broke the giraffe’s neck and consumed its head.

Krila was, at heart, a simple girl. So long as she had friends, dark rituals, and animal crackers, the world seemed okay again.

* * *

 

It was a slow day in the Rbit Room. Aru, who was developing her secret talent of condensing the secrets of thousands years of accumulated bunny warfare into a 5-7-5 haiku, had run into a creative block. Her fountain pen paused as she scribbled down yet another alternative form:

_An umbrella is_

_when bullets fall like spring rain_

_but upwards instead???_

On the whole, though, it had given her a chance to recover from the loss of a night’s sleep. She had refilled the Well of Patience, descended the Steps of Hostility, and was now brewing the Tea of Reconciliation for when QP turned up after school, no doubt with her head full of dreams and her her heart full of potential heroics. When the doorbell finally rang, she was ready to accept QP’s nascent superhero ambitions with open arms.

“Oh, that? Actually, I decided not to be a superhero after all,” QP said, experimentally dipping an animal cracker into the Tea of Reconciliation. She looked at the cracker gorilla, who had been thoroughly conciliated, and consumed it with a grimace. Even with their combined might, she and Krila had been unable to vanquish the unending tide of animal crackers; even Aru’s tea, usually a potent aid to digestion, wasn’t doing the trick.

“Why?”

“Oh, you know. I thought about it,” QP said airily. “But I figured: wouldn’t I be super liable for collateral damage or something? I already spend all my allowance on pudding, so I don’t think I could afford it. That’s why all the best superheroes are millionaires.”

“And _fictional_ ,” Aru added.

QP ignored her. She had a rare talent for ignoring things or people who were inconvenient to her, and often showcased it. Instead, she pulled a notebook from her bag, along with a random handful of coloured pencils. “I’m still making a costume, though. I figure that even if I can’t _be_ a superhero, I can at least _play_ superheroes. I think Krila would really like that.”

As she settled down and began drawing up designs for a mask and scarf, Aru felt her heart soften a little. She took a sip of the Tea of Reconciliation, and, even though it tasted of faintly stale animal crackers, she felt its warmth seeping deep down into her soul. She reached out and – very gently – began to scratch QP behind the ears.

“You’re a good girl, QP,” she said. And this time, she believed it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back to the present day! That means I'll be putting author's notes from this chapter onward.


End file.
